Netvibes feels good, man

For several years I have been using a My Yahoo home page. It seemed to have almost everything that I needed, and I especially liked the ability to customise the look and feel. Mine is a nice set of matching yellows, ochres and browns and, organised into four tabs, keeps most of what I thought I needed in one convenient place.

Today I looked again at Netvibes and decided to switch to using this as my home page for the moment. The layout is not as good, although I saw from the blog that custom themes and background images have risen to the top of their to-do list. More importantly though, the range of content is far wider in some areas.

I can now read the subjects of my Arcada mail and my GMail accounts. If I paid Yahoo $20 a year I could read my Yahoo mail as well. (Yahoo.com is about the only mail provider that charges for pop access to your mail account.) I can also get a Flickr photo-stream and read my Del.icio.us bookmarks, as well as having unlimited RSS feeds.

I might set up all the feeds I currently have in Sage for Firefox, and see if it is easier scanning them in a tab in Netvibes. It looks like it ought to be, and it will prevent me having them stored differently in different local folders on different computers.

This relates directly to my WikkaBliki project, because since this all works with RSS feeds and open APIs then it ought to be possible to add this functionality to this site, eventually. AKi has shown me some articles that suggest that, very soon, blogs will be the new home pages. Fred Wilson of the blog A VC in NYC:

In the next ten years, most people who want an online home will have a blog, it will be their online identity and their start page and much more.

I haven’t done it yet, but I should change my start page to my blog. That’s where I go to start my day and end my day. And I am hell bent to configure my blog with enough functionality that it can be my newspaper, my inbox, my tv, my radio, and my social network. It’s pretty damn close already.

Well, why not? Why wouldn’t I want my own knowledge-base as my home page?