A few years ago I extolled the virtues of myHq, a very simple service that I used for my browser’s home page. It allowed me to categorize frequently used links, muck around a bit with the format, and all that good stuff.
Every so often, I’d try out Google’s personalized home page or revisit my old, old My Yahoo page just to see if it might be worth switching to something a little more robust. I always came back to the old standby.
But that’s changed as of earlier this week. After more than three years using myHq, I’ve now switched to Netvibes. I’d tried Netvibes a while ago, apparently, because when I went there earlier this week some personalizations were in place. I decided to take another look this week when I saw it mentioned elsewhere and I was really, really impressed. So much so, that I exported my links from myHq (thanks!) and imported them into a bookmarks widget in Netvibes (one that properly tagged and categorized everything making it even more usable).
My new home page is divided into three columns. The leftmost column has the latest entries from three web sites I enjoy reading by had to remove from my feedreader because there was too much content (Boing Boing, Metafilter, and Digg). The middle column has my bookmarks and a plug-in for my Box.net online file storage. It’s really nice to be able to browse my files from there. The rightmost column has a notepad area for quick notes (currently holding “Ping ideas”), the obligatory weather forecast, my “watched” items on ebay (nice!), and thumbnails from a flickr stream (right now, anything tagged with “woods”).
To make things even better, it supports multiple tabs and the interface is all Ajax-y.
Give it a shot. There are some really great plug-ins and I think that these guys are destined for greatness. It takes a lot to make me change my ways, but they did it.
Posted in Technology
Paul September 15, 2006, 9:36 pm
Netvibes frightens me.
Ryan September 16, 2006, 7:12 pm
It shouldn’t scare you. You should love it like a brother.