I HAZ Ginger!

(Forgive the title, but it appears to be how to declare one is using the product. I would have chosen the title O Pioneers!)

I am officially a beta tester (that’s private beta). I received an invitation to test the upcoming Ginger release of Netvibes. I have never tested anything before, but I love Netvibes. Ginger is more social network than the previous versions, and now users can create their own public pages of feeds (called Universes). Before, only organizations and famous pop stars could create Universes on Netvibes. My public pages are viewable here. The first tab, General, is admittedly a mess; I haven’t decided on a theme, and am using it to play around. The next two tabs focus on government information. I’ve chosen feeds from the FDLP, FGI, and the blogs of various government agencies.

The nice thing is that I can still maintain my private page. I can also send widgets to my private page from my public page and vice versa. There’s an option to mark items to share publicly or save privately. The feed now displays when the article was posted (see below). This keeps me from skimming the same feeds, only to wonder if I’ve seen them before.

Unfortunately, it takes some of the feeds longer to load than in the Coriander release, but this is beta, it’s to be expected, and the Netvibes people are working on it. I would like to see the basic feeds include the option to display thumbnail images. Pageflakes does this, and it keeps one’s page from looking like an ocean of text:

Compare this to the same feed rendered in a Netvibes widget:

I would also like to see a video player added, so one can view video feeds without leaving the page. This works with certain widgets, but not with vodcasts.

All in all, I’m pleased with the new product. And as long as I can keep my private page private, and my public Universe on the side, I’m looking forward to the official release.

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