New layouts, OpenSocial and LeWeb’08
We have exciting news for end-users, developers and partners today! We are adding new features, upgrading the widget technology and launching a new business product.
Flexible layout
In this update, we are introducing new features that will let you customize your page further, turning it into a gorgeous personalized magazine.
Thinking out of the grid
The first change affects the way you lay your page out. Widgets are no longer limited to columns: we are introducing dozen of new layouts where widget can expand across the columns. Switching to a new layout is instantaneous: open the tab options, select a layout and see the result.
Layouts are made of 1 to 4 boxes where you can stack widgets. We also improved the way you drag’n'drop widget to reorganize your page.
Really Sexy Syndication
The second change is about rendering RSS feeds. We’ve always been working to make RSS more interesting and attractive. Today, we are pushing the limits by displaying text, photo and video in four different ways: Ticker (scrolling headlines), Carousel (gallery), Magazine (front story plus gallery) and Normal (multi-feed, multi-tab). Any RSS can benefit from these new visualization options. To use one these new views, click “Edit” on your feed widget and select a view in the pull down menu.
The most powerful widget technology : UWA and OpenSocial
We also have excellent news for developers: we have a public preview of UWA (Universal Widget API) with OpenSocial compatibility. Developers can now create a new generation of smart, social widget that can easily tap into Users’ social networks and run on virtually all widget platforms and desktops.
To illustrate the concept, we’ve built a social weather widget where you can see your forecast and your friends’, along with their comment about the weather. This widget is available in the sandbox we’re openning for developers to test. More details about UWA and OpenSocial will be posted soon on the DevBlog and in the forum.
In addition to making UWA more powerful, Netvibes is now supporting the Google Gadget format, advancing its position as the development platform of choice for thousands of the world’s top brands, marketing agencies and developers.
Widget distribution
Netvibes guarantee the distribution and installation across a global audience of widget users on Netvibes.com, and deploy custom branded widget startpage within their own Web properties. Usually served by our machines, this branded start page can now be delivered from your server. To learn more about widget distribution, go to http://business.netvibes.com/ or join us at LeWeb’08 in Paris. We’re throwing a cocktail reception there tomorrow. If you’re around, join us!
We hope that you will enjoy these new features. Let us know what you think by sending us your feedback!
Related posts:
- New icons and updated Magazine-like layouts
- Coriander launch : step 1
- Netvibes anise version : the new features in details (part 2)
- New views for your feeds
- Flickr module
netvibes
#1 | Rami | December 8th, 2008 at 22:17
great work, love it as usual. keep it up guys.
#2 | Dave | December 8th, 2008 at 22:26
Love the new layout options. This is exactly the type of "core" feature I’d like to see more focus on instead of the social networking fluff. The RSS viewing options are interesting, but it might take a while to determine if I find any of them truly useful.
#3 | Bertrand | December 8th, 2008 at 22:28
Seems like a great update. Continuez.
#4 | Jac | December 8th, 2008 at 22:43
Well done !!!!!!!!!!!
#5 | theadb | December 8th, 2008 at 23:53
Terrible update…The new rss views dramatically reduce readability and aren’t very pretty. Drag-and-drop of widgets has significantly slowed down. The new layouts are useless – Just allow resizing of the grid.
#6 | JetLag | December 9th, 2008 at 00:08
I simply love it. my page is easier to read. Keep up the great work
#7 | ... | December 9th, 2008 at 00:16
How do you make one feed widget display several rss feeds?
#8 | ENrique | December 9th, 2008 at 00:21
Wow… the new drag&drop is really fast for me. Much better than before.
I wont use the new layouts but I guess for feeds with pictures it could be a nice addition.
When do you plan to have OpenSocial live? Can’t wait to try it!
#9 | Keith Peters | December 9th, 2008 at 01:28
I’m getting some runaway cpu use on the magazine layout. Can’t pin it down, but cpu just starts going crazy and stays that way til i quit the browser. Firefox 3.04.
#10 | Remove Share Icons | December 9th, 2008 at 02:19
Can I get rid of the share icons that take up space in some feeds yet?
#11 | Kane | December 9th, 2008 at 04:53
My name is Kane.
I figured I’d give netvibes a try since I have decided to remove Google from my life as much as possible. So the first step is to sign up, right? I just tried that and when I entered "Kane" for a username I was denied since "this username is already in use."
Seriously? I really don’t care if someone else has my name too, that’s their right. But that doesn’t mean I want my username to be Kane123ABC. You know what I have that NO ONE else has? My email address.
Everyone in the world should be using email address as a log-in now; username-based log-ins are so 2000’s. Let’s evolve please.
…and to whoever else out there is named Kane: I love you, never change.
#12 | ali hussain | December 9th, 2008 at 07:48
Thankyou. Netvibes needed a change. Great layout
#13 | Curious about app xml | December 9th, 2008 at 08:15
This sounds quite promising.
How do I add an arbitrary OpenSocial app to the sandbox?
I wanted to add the OpenSocial compliance test:
code.google.com/p/opensoc…
opensocial-resources.goog…
#14 | dsinisa | December 9th, 2008 at 11:15
is it just me or with the new RSS styles I can no longer see what is read and what is new?
#15 | Hans | December 9th, 2008 at 11:52
Terrible! Moving the modules up or down is terrible now!
Before this took me half a second, now this works so slow I need 2 or 3 seconds to move a module up or down. And sometimes it is annoying; I cannot see what or where I am moving it…
#16 | Crux | December 9th, 2008 at 12:33
This layout is very nice for me, too.
However, I can’t show my public page with Internet Explorer in case of logging out.
Are there any troubles in new layout?
#17 | ravaza | December 9th, 2008 at 14:23
Great !
few comments:
– can I hide the "share" button ?
– can we have more layouts please ? these one are fantastic but I miss a 4 column one with col 1 & 2 merged
– I would love another view with only pics (for sites like icanhascheezburger.com) and I need these pics not to be cut.
Keep the great work !
alain le frenchy
#18 | Iri | December 9th, 2008 at 15:23
Nice idea of features, but I think, they weren’t tested well.
When using magazine or carousel my CPU workload soars to maximum. Finally my FF (3.0.4) crashed and my organized tabs were gone.
Every feed was put in a recovered tab and I had to reorganize my feeds again. -.-
#19 | alex_mayorga | December 9th, 2008 at 15:25
Kudos on all the changes, it’s great to have the options. Am I the only one seeing the need for an "Undo" button on the layouts? I rather don’t try them without the "safe net" of being able to back-out if I seriously mangle the current layout. I’d say the same for "Themes", the other day I dared to try one of the Christmas ones and ended up digging for my previous one for quite some time.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the changes but a forgiving Netvibes would be icing on the cake.
Merry holidays to the Netvibes team & community and keep the excellent work up.
#20 | Biebs | December 9th, 2008 at 18:17
Question:
It seems like other people can no longer link to my netvibes page (www.netvibes.com/biebs) and look at my links. Is this a perm. change? Is this an option I unclicked by accident?
I liked being able to send the page to family and friends who wanted to look at it.
#21 | Estragon Phipps | December 10th, 2008 at 02:08
Just an observation. My browser (Firefox 3.0.4) began limping badly, to an almost comical degree. Netvibes was the only thing that had changed (I had applied the new Magazine layout to a couple of feeds) and closing its tab seemed to slick things back up. I hope/assume it’s temporary as nothing else handles feeds in quite the way I like.
It could also just be my imagination; I have been doing a lot of glue.
#22 | Gustav | December 10th, 2008 at 15:21
A very nice update! I wanted layout options like these for a long time, and I do think that Netvibes is the first startpage to break out of the grid! iGoogle doesn’t seem to allow it anyway. The new RSS views probably won’t work on each and every feed, but if you take some time to edit your page I think they could bring some variation to a design. Ticker view would benefit from more font and color options I think. Question: When will the social weather widget be availble for users to add to their page?
#23 | pb | December 10th, 2008 at 21:51
In my opinion all this layout stuff is more or less useless – I can’t get the advantages… ?
But I like all development concerning gadgets and I like netvibes
#24 | Webkatalog | December 11th, 2008 at 14:53
Love the new layout options. This is exactly the type of "core" feature I’d like to see more focus on instead of the social networking fluff. The RSS viewing options are interesting, but it might take a while to determine if I find any of them truly useful.
#25 | Menorca | December 11th, 2008 at 18:24
Sensational
I thinks this strategy is very nice and I can imagine where are we going to
regards
#26 | iwao | December 11th, 2008 at 18:29
Tres bonne update, mais ya une chose que j’attends depuis des années et que d’autres sites avez fait donc ca doit pas etre trop dur a faire, c’est de pouvoir afficher les news par date, exemple afficher que les news d’aujourdhui, celle d’hier ou celle de la semaine, ca fesait gagnez enormement en lisibiliter.
(desoler pour les accents je suis en qwerty la)
#27 | Carl | December 11th, 2008 at 19:04
How do I use the Washington Post widget with canvas view that you show in the video? It’s great that you’re adding these new features, but you really should make them easily discoverable or explain how to use them.
#28 | Carl | December 11th, 2008 at 19:11
Just to make it clear, the standard Washington Post Netvibes widget does not have canvas view as you show on this page. I’d like to use the one you show here but can’t figure out how to add it.
#29 | José Luis Padilla | December 11th, 2008 at 19:41
Thanks for the new things!
Can i suggest a layout?
For the 4 columns, the same that the second option but the boxes 3 and 4 above box 1. The third option is the same case.
I think that now is importan create the 5 columns.
And the last, i would like that the columns could move like the classic columns.
Thank you again!
A fan.
#30 | Phil Miller | December 11th, 2008 at 20:03
This is excellent. It looks awesome.
#31 | William | December 11th, 2008 at 20:14
I agree, new layouts are completely pointless. They either cut off a partial view of a widget or expand it way out of control. Plus you lose the option of moving them around.
#32 | fjpoblam | December 11th, 2008 at 20:19
Great idea. Netvibes is of course THE start page. This improvement will be much better once some of the RSS feeders get around to making offerings that take advantage. (As of the present, some of mine offer only "space-filling" meaningless icons in some of the new views.)
#33 | danielgc | December 11th, 2008 at 20:38
Excellent work, the best reader
#34 | Galatea99 | December 11th, 2008 at 20:57
Thanks for trying, but. I left iGoogle last month and joined netvibes specifically because they changed the GUI with no opt-out offered. Please allow us to keep viewing Netvibes using the layout that we saw when we came in, regardless of subsequent design changes.
I am currently blocking Google – including blocking google ads, statistics and their search engine, because their refusal to listen to their users is offensive and irresponsible. I will not use anything related to OpenSocial, either.
for those of us who hate Google, please offer a different search engine option to include at the tops of our pages, and please, if you adopt one of their technologies please only do so if there is no open source alternative.
#35 | Marcos | December 11th, 2008 at 21:06
Great work! You’ve been my homepage for more tham two years, and no other is so useful, beautiful and neat as Netvibes. Carry on with this great work!
#36 | William | December 11th, 2008 at 21:24
Forgot to add earlier that I have gotten some huge spikes in cpu usage trying the different views for RSS feeds with firefox browser.
#37 | Steven442 | December 11th, 2008 at 21:32
The carousel and magazine views definitely cannot be safe for a computer system. If you so much as hover over the box cpu usage spikes through the roof. Mine went from 7% to over 70%. Definitely a flaw here.
#38 | Furious Fury | December 11th, 2008 at 22:36
Your layout is still not as flexible as the one of Protopage.
#39 | :: melenda :: | December 12th, 2008 at 01:31
Excellent. Thank you for all of your hard work. I too am a refugee from iGoogle, and I’m grateful to have found a new home in Netvibes. I recommend it to all of my friends. I am especially pleased to see the new layout grids available. I love how clean, simple and customizable the interface is. Again, thank you!
#40 | Siverstar98121 | December 12th, 2008 at 02:11
Kane @12, the problem was that you capitalized Kane. I ran into this problem when I signed up, too. Netvibes needs to make their error message specify that you must use lower case. They are running people like you and me off because we can’t figure it out. I was so pissed off I finally typed in whatthehell, hit send, and got in. Then I changed my username. Glad I could do that, or I’d be running around being whatthehell. Could be worse, I could have used a different word for the last four letters.
#41 | wilmer | December 12th, 2008 at 06:22
awesome!
i pretty love this more than igoogle.
netvibes rocks!
#42 | Dr. Gobo | December 12th, 2008 at 08:52
Cool update. The carousel/magazine views take up a lot of cpu, but its optional. It would be nice if there was more to offer in hovering over links. For example, on a wallpaper site(interfacelift or deviantart) it would automatically show the picture and when hovered away it goes away etc. My yahoo does this well with a magnifying glass when clicked you get a preview.
I hope the next update features performance/network enhancements since netvibes is slower than igoogle or myahoo.
#43 | Jeroen | December 12th, 2008 at 09:28
Sweet update guys! Lets dominate iGoogle!
Keep up the good work.
#44 | Marc | December 12th, 2008 at 09:35
I like the idea of the new layouts, but I’m a little disappointed with the implementation. I really miss the ability to resize the widths of the boxes, as you can do with the normal column layout. I also noticed in the second 4-box layout that box 3&4 didn’t align properly with box 1, because box 1 was a little wider than 3&4 combined. Also, the performance in Opera seems to get worse with every update.
#45 | Eitan | December 12th, 2008 at 10:02
To much memory demanding.
I love Netvibes! but I’ve a long RSS list, so when I open Netvibes in my browser the memory usage is enormous, but if I’m opening my RSS list with ‘igoogle’ the memory demanding of the browser is much, much lower.
#46 | ecolady | December 12th, 2008 at 11:12
To the poster who asks how to display more than one feed in a widget – I use Feedjumbler (which allows you to aggregate the feeds into a single feed – thought it is down at this precise minute) and run that in.
But maybe someone has a better solution?
#47 | juan pablo | December 12th, 2008 at 11:14
well done guys!!!
#48 | MrGutts | December 12th, 2008 at 12:25
A Greek that posts in English? Who would have thunk it.
Anywho, it’s a nice addition, but it is way to resource intensive on memory and cpu. I will just stick with my normal rss text,no picture layout.
#49 | mo. | December 12th, 2008 at 13:23
excellent work. i am thinking about integrating your services on my websites to deliver our readers a bundle of other ressources. the idea with the magazine look-a-like is very clever!
#50 | captain awesome | December 12th, 2008 at 15:04
approved.
#51 | Carlo | December 12th, 2008 at 15:21
Flexyble layout: only the first design has got 4 columns, I think there should be more, with different cells merged as in the other designs with 3 columns. It would be useful for those with non 4:3 monitors.
#52 | felt87 | December 12th, 2008 at 15:42
fascinating.
going up one step, people wish next one. they never be fully satisfied. but we know "Netvibes" is trying to be and really getting better. so i spend more time on netvibes. i love Netvibes.
magazine view can not distinguish read and unread? it is the point i’m not satisfied.
#53 | Dmitriy Bondar | December 12th, 2008 at 17:01
Thanks to all of you guys. The new drag&drop is amaising.
Canvas view rocks. Good job Netvibes team.
#54 | Rollo | December 13th, 2008 at 10:55
Can you please remove the banner now? It is ugly and takes up space.
#55 | tobto | December 14th, 2008 at 00:15
incredible long awaited feature! thank you! it would be nice to have liquid stretching css-design
#56 | leonardo | December 14th, 2008 at 01:29
Congratulations for the new options for widget visualization, but there’s one I have been waiting forever and is still not here: An image-only view, much in the same way as the ‘Thumbnails’ view of the Flickr widget. That would be ideal for design and art feeds, where the image is often more relevant than the text.
Can I expect this in some not-too-distant future? Pleeeeease? It would finally turn Netvibes into the perfect feed displaying tool.
#57 | Aw Guo | December 15th, 2008 at 12:46
I really love the new layout!
It makes Netvibes more useful!
#58 | Paul Komarek | December 15th, 2008 at 14:12
I absolutely hate having any of the social networking features active on my feed reader. How can I eliminate all of them, and just read stuff without distraction?
#59 | Moritz Jakobsen | December 15th, 2008 at 19:27
Congratulations! you’re doing a great job.
#60 | ballwarm | December 16th, 2008 at 03:17
I love netvibes!!
Wow~~Thanks a lot.
#61 | Home | December 16th, 2008 at 13:17
I love these new layouts………thanks guys
#62 | brooonzyah | December 16th, 2008 at 16:18
I thinks this strategy is very nice and I can imagine where are we going to
#63 | Mathiew | December 16th, 2008 at 16:43
Thanks to all of you guys. The new drag&drop is amaising.
Canvas view rocks. Good job Netvibes team.
#64 | pullupyourdamnpants | December 16th, 2008 at 23:17
Sounds lovely, but I see no way to download this new version. I really can’t figure it out. Someone tell me how stupid I am and show me the way?
#65 | indir | December 17th, 2008 at 10:43
Congratulations! you’re doing a great job…
#66 | Chichy | December 17th, 2008 at 10:45
Guys, the [x] on your yellow "New feature" box doesn’t show up at the correct place in Firefox 2. It always appears over the logout link.
It’s only now that I upgraded to FF3 that this [x] is displayed correctly and now I understand what it is for.
#67 | sikiş | December 19th, 2008 at 00:43
I liked being able to send the page to family and friends who wanted to look at it.
#68 | AlexTheMartian | December 19th, 2008 at 09:19
Can there be a way to resize the new layouts, just as you can do with the 1st layout? The little resize bar between the columns, that is missing on new layouts.
#69 | AlexTheMartian | December 19th, 2008 at 09:20
Also, I think the Magazine view should have options of number of stories to show.
#70 | Asfalia | December 23rd, 2008 at 12:46
The carousel and magazine views definitely cannot be safe for a computer system. If you so much as hover over the box cpu usage spikes through the roof. Mine went from 7% to over 70%. Definitely a flaw here.
#71 | Livret A | December 24th, 2008 at 15:23
Congrats really great job!
#72 | Diablo | December 26th, 2008 at 18:41
Magazine and Carousel views bring my browser to a crawl like others are reporting! Plus, in those views, many of my feeds don’t transmit the image so I just get generic icons instead. But the biggest problem is the toll these views take on your system and therefore, make them useless. I like the new layout options though.
#73 | Quikboy | December 27th, 2008 at 21:07
Could you please make an IE8 Web Slice? You guys already make a Firefox extension, so it would be awesome if you guys could create something for us IE users. Thanks.
#74 | gillian williams | December 29th, 2008 at 10:04
call me dumb but i started to create my netvibes site after seeing a friend’s – she had her articles and photographs displayed on her own background with no widget in site (i always thought a widget was a little plastic thing in the bottom of beer cans).
i am not interested in ‘widgets’ created by someone else containing someone else’s ideas – i want a website to display MY work. perhaps netvibes is the wrong tool for me; perhaps i should be using flash or dreamweaver?
#75 | Inbal | December 29th, 2008 at 23:19
I tailed off the website for quite a while, as my personal need for it decreased and nothing revolutionary was in sight, but I felt strangely proud of you when I got your first newsletter and read this post. However, I should have expected the sudden change of tone when arriving at the comments section: a niggling bunch of bantams, who can’t form more than two sentences that don’t revolve around the unendurable incommodities of technology, let alone propose an original idea. Once in every 50 comments, someone writes something constructive, and is immediately buried under added applause for whomever cried "useless!". I didn’t try the new features yet, so I have no idea if or how much they slow down people’s computers, but no wonder Netvibes’ performance can be inferior to its vision.
Eliminating columns can definitely be key to personalization of aesthetics if done properly, and spontaneous adjustment really is something to insist on – maybe mixing vertical and horizontal "columns", or boxes, characterized by individual direction and number of widgets, which could then be re-sized freely within their territory.
All the bitching about every conceivable social feature is a real mystery to me, when the same amounts of people (or the same people, period) have been complaining forever about the frivolity of social networks, and about contemporary technology’s inability to be a significant human tool – what suggestions, exactly, are you bringing to the table? Plastic containers attached to a string?
The recalcitrant attitude towards Google is completely understandable to me, but Netvibes deserve some respect for actively supporting different formats, popular or not, competitors or otherwise. For some reason, that loses all importance when people start acquiring major enterprises and stop behaving as martyrly as you may have liked.
#76 | Inbal | December 30th, 2008 at 05:50
OK, a few specific remarks about the layouts… You simply cannot set a given number of sizes in advance and expect it to serve every combination of widgets your users will come up with – that’s insane. You will find yourselves adding examples of 5 models ("boxes"), and 6 models, and so on forever, in order to set aside visual orchestration. Find a way to let people build those models themselves – it shouldn’t be that difficult after you define all the factors.
Took a look at your new themes, by the way – absolutely stunning. The only thing missing is a tea house atmosphere – tried several times to create one, and even Gmail’s attempt is a joke – but that’s just to satisfy my captiousness. It didn’t have any unusual effect on my CPU, for your information.
#77 | bootleg movies | January 5th, 2009 at 05:36
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