Design vs Art Blog

What’s your home page? I was using iGoogle for a long time but I decided to try Netvibes, an Ajax based personalized start page.

The whole thing is Ajax and it works perfect. You can add as many modules including RSS/Atom feeds and other widgets, then you can sort them in personalized tabs, for example, I have a tab for “Web2.0″ feeds, another for Web2.0 feeds in German language and another more for the ones in Spanish. Changing tabs is fast as the news are loaded and reloaded only from time to time, and not every time you go to that tab.

My personal Netvibes home page

You can also choose among many third party “universes”, those are like Netvibes home pages designed and customized by other companies. Like this one made by The Financial Times:

I like so much to have a module with my Remember The Milk tasks, another with my Gmail and another one with a Google/Yahoo! search box. clicking on a small arrow that appears on the module title as you hover over, allows you to open and close that module, an important feature for privacy reasons too.

The whole design is very slick and adding modules is extremely easy. For example, to add a feed just paste the site address and Netvibes will list the available feeds for that site. It also has a very useful “In my page” search that searches only among your feeds. Fantastic.

They also have a reasonable amount of documentation on their Netvibes’ Developer Network home page. Their Universal Widget API (UWA) from Netvibes allows developers to build widgets that will work on every platform or blog system. Your personal Netvibes home page is also reachable through your mobile device at m.netvibes.com

Picture taken from the Netvibes blog

I really like the Netvibes User Interface and don’t have complaints so far

Popularity: 10% [?]

It is not new that Google bought Jaiku.com, a Finnish microblogging and mini messaging service. I could a have said “Jaiku is a quasi Twitter site”, but the problem is that in Europe nobody knows Twitter (kind of).

With Jaiku you can create an activity stream log with messages and pictures and post it directly to Jaiku. These streams can be shared through the web, instant messager, SMS and third-party applications. It seems that Jaiku is very strong in the mobile field, providing a “live phonebook” that displays the activity streams, locations of contacts (HOT) and availability. I wanted to sign up for an account and install the mobile version but it seems that they close the registration since Google acquisition. Sad.

But right now I am more interested in the Jaiku web design. Last weekend I was at the BarCamp Munich, there a discussion around Twitter was hold. My impression was that in Europe people don’t know what they can do with Twitter, and after the explanation a lot of scepticism was heard. It is true that this kind of service is limited in European countries by the price of SMSs, much more expensive than in the US. But another thing must be said, Twitter home page does not explain very well what that site is for. In this sense, Jaiku is clearly doing it much better:

Jaiku is placing the explanation in the home page, click on it and you are redirected to the welcome tour, which is clear enough. I have to confess that I have critics regarding the usability, I would change a few things here, for example they try to explain the service to newcomers with a phrase like “Post new Jaikus”. What the hell is a “Jaiku”? (OK, I can imagine what that is, but it might not be clear enough for many users).

From my point of view Google has made another good move as Jaiku seems to have a much more clear interface and, maybe, better chances to win European hearts. I would really like to test it!

Popularity: 32% [?]