April 19, 2006 - kenshinjeff
netvibes.com
This is an interesting site which was brought to my attention today, by YC, a classmate of mine: http://www.netvibes.com/
If you take a look at it, you’ll find that it’s pretty close to Google’s personal startup page. But of course, they did a much better job than Google for this, which is quite rare for a startup’s project.
What intrigues me is their revenue model. It really makes me wonder what will happen in the near future. Possibly a subscription service? Or will it be filled with ads?
Currently, the page itself loads really slowly to me, probably it’s entirely dynamic now, possibly that can be solved by some neat algorithms which can determine which feeds are similar and, cache the similar ones together, a relatively small problem as compared to their soon to be exponentially increasing bandwidth requirements.
All in all, it’s a pretty nifty idea but I won’t be using it though. I woudn’t need an aggregator to read off a whole chunk of different feeds, that’ll be a whole lot of rubbish information overload, even for one who reads/watch everything like me.
What that site is missing is a community feature. A way for people who use the same website to share information with one another. Then again, their business model probably doesn’t fulfill that requirement in the first place, therefore, I conclude that development will halt somewhere near the time where they run out of resources, and whatever’s that left will be left for the opensourced community to further develop.
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