Checking out the new Netvibes Ginger

No comments // Jan 20th, 2008 // reviews

It’s been a while (I don’t know a correct and beautiful English word for ‘way too long’ ;)) since I last posted something on my blog. Besides the automated del.icio.us links, not much happened the latest months. It’s not that I didn’t do anything, but I decided to read a little and preferred to do some other things first. Priorities and stuff? Yeah, you know that. As from today I’m back and will try to blog a little more often. And I would like to start with blogging about the new Ginger release of Netvibes.

Ginger has been announced a while ago on the web2.0 summit in Berlin in November 2007. I was there together with two colleagues of mine (our creative director, Jan Algoed and Geert Leysen) and must admit I was very intrigued by what Tariq Krim from Netvibes told (and showed) us in a 20 minute presentation. The demo looked promising and the theory and reasoning behind it were very clever. ‘Social aggregation‘ was key in his speech and it was something Tim O’Reilly forecasted to be a hot topic in 2008. Instead of - once more - inviting all your friends to a new web2.0 site, social aggregation would enable you to add friends from other social networks without too much efforts. API’s and the OpenSocial project allow developers to check your friends at Facebook for instance and easily search for them on the new platform or allow you to easily follow what they do on their platforms of choice in the one you prefer.

Anyway, I was amazed. Only a few weeks ago Ginger went into closed beta. I immediately started looking for a way in, but didn’t succeed. I even followed Tariq’s twitter very closely and tried emailing him, but my email probably stayed unread in between his other thousands requests of fans ;). Anyway, today I received an email from netvibes stating that I was part of the closed beta from now on. So I started checking out Ginger immediately.

Here is my two cents after a two-hour try-out:

I switched from Netvibes to Bloglines because I mainly used it for reading my blogs. Bloglines is way easier and it loads like a million times faster. This is still the case and a major issue (imho). It loads sloooow.
The AJAX-implementations are done great. It looks beautiful.
The new Ginger theme is nicer (e.g. rounded corners) than the ones available before
Adding content is way more userfriendly (I prefer the wide box on top over the small left hand bar) but it lacks some things like the possibility to see how many people have installed the specific widget, the possibility to rate them, the possibility to sort widgets within a category on name, times added to a user’s page, …
Uploading an OPML file didn’t work out fine. But I guess they are aware of the problem.
Finally everyone can make his own ‘universe’, which is your public profile page. It is like the private one, but most of the times with less information :). But you only get to make one universe (not one for myself and anotherone for my company for instance - subscribing a second time would solve this offcourse)
You can easily star items, which is adding a comment to a favorite widget or post that is shared with your friends. Besides the fact that I often don’t have the time to keep with things I like, I don’t think it is that interesting to know what my friends like best. Especially not with how it is implemented now: like the twitter-followers page you have an overview of all activities of all your friends. There is no way to limit the list to just one friend’s starred items or to only show the status updates instead of all updates in an easy way. Offcourse you can browse to your friends’ page and check his activities, but it should be easier (e.g. by sorting/grouping).
Starred items are put in an ‘activities’ overview per day. A little strange I think. I don’t remember when I starred a specific item and it seems to be necessary to remember that to find them back, since there is no search provided. I am fond of the bloglines ‘pin this’ or ’save this’ functionality they added in their beta. It allows you to put items you star in categories you can manage yourself.
You have a public and private activity overview, there is no possibility to watch both activities together.
Your friends’ activities seem to show up in one long list. It doesn’t look at the calendar even if you explicitly select a specific day. I have only one friend for the moment since there are no other people I know ;-) but I wonder what it would look like if I have 30 friends that use Netvibes very intensively?
There is little consistency in naming: ‘universe’ and ‘public profile’, ’star’ and ‘favorite’, what you ‘make as favorite’ shows up as ‘Bart has shared’ etcetera.
Adding friends (or searching for friends) is easy: they build connections with API’s from gmail, yahoo mail, MSN, AIM and more (facebook to come). However: you can only search who is in the netvibes community already. No way to invite friends or to add friends that are solely on other platforms. I hate for a fact that I can’t check the status updates of my Facebook friends in Netvibes for instance. Tariq was full of social aggregation and ginger doens’t add much more than some API integrations. I hoped for a more complete aggregation (true aggregation).
Searching for friends in the netvibes database of users is not possible. You can only search within your own friends. Adding friends can thus only be done by using the API-solutions or by browsing through your friends’ friends and adding the ones you know.
Sharing widgets (on your univers, on your blog or using mail) is easy and require only a one-click operation. I might however want to send a set of friends interested in a specific topic a specific widget, but that’s not possible. The advantage of having friends in ginger is not used as it could be. Something for the future?

I am a little disappointed as you may have noticed, but has mainly to do with my expectations. The update is big and interesting, but as it is in a beta it still needs some work. Useability wise there is a lot of work and on the functionality side a lot of updates/improvements can still be made.

PS: if you have no clue about what I am talking, have a look at this post on the Netvibes forum. Tariq gives a small demo on the new functionalities.