Netvibes, a company that lets users personalize their home page by pulling in things like their RSS feeds, social networks, and email on a single page, is letting users do even more customization with a new area called Netvibes Labs. In Labs, users can both try out new features before they're released and vote on the ideas that NetVibes works on next.
The "labs" idea may be most familair to users of Gmail, where users can find experimental features such as offline access and an "undo" button in the Labs area. Netvibes Labs is starting out relatively small, with three new features: a Theme Designer where users can customize the appearance of their homepage or import XML themes, a Tag Cloud built around common terms in your feeds and widgets, and Spring Cleaning, a tool for revealing old or unread feeds. All of these sound fun or useful, but what's probably more significant is the Labs concept, and how it might help Netvibes stay innovative as new players enter the market (such as Sobees, a desktop that gives you easy access to multiple social networks, which launched last month at the DEMO conference). Not even Google's customized homepage, iGoogle, has a Labs feature.
"These projects are a unique innovation to the portal and startpage world in the sense that they aren't widgets within your page, they're external apps that can use your startpage data in new ways," said Netvibes' Vincent Chang. "So today you [use] Netvibes.com as a startpage, but perhaps tomorrow one could build a separate social network, activity feed app or other mashup that uses all that incredibly personalized data and user's content preferences in new ways. And we're asking users where they would like to go with this."
like ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick, that Netvibes will be putting its free consumer product on "life support" while it focusing on the things that make money, such as sponsored widgets and branded microsites for marketing, as well as customizable portals for use in a business environment. It looks like we won't stop seeing new NetVibes features anytime soon, though how quickly they'll roll out isn't clear. Chang says the business side is doing well too, with the San Francisco company set to break even in September.
Netvibes raised $15 million back in 2006.