netvibes - (re)mix the web

Most of you have come to Netvibes for the global widgets, the all-in-one start-page with all your everyday services at your fingertips. And that’s cool, but there’s more to the Internet than Yahoo!, Gmail, Flickr, Facebook and YouTube, y’know?

You might not be aware of this, but Netvibes is not one start-page, but many start-pages: each locale presents its users with set of global widgets, along with a selection of local feeds and even widgets - which selection is made by local Netvibes users.

For instance:
- Italian locale will present you with the feeds from Corriere della Sera, among others.
- Canadian locale: TSN’s feed with pictures.
- Danish locale: Jyllands-Posten’s.
- Japan locale: Yahoo! Japan Daily News and other feeds.

What I mean to say with this list is that local content is as important to us as is global content - and it’s even the primary reason behind UWA and Ecosystem: to let developers build widget for local services, to let users submit local feeds and data, and have all these local items be available to all Netvibes users.

“Local items” can mean anything from one country’s little known service, to its most celebrated newspaper, with the corner-shop’s RSS feed in between! Simply put, items that you, yourself, find interesting to have in your page, could most probably also be of much use to a hosts of other users.

Our belief in local widget is no smoke and mirrors: we actually do build widgets in order to scratch an itch or to fill a need. The Twitter widget, for instance, started-out as side-project from one of our developers, and is now featured on most locales as a global widget. This is true for many other Netvibes widgets.

But we do push a bit further down the “local widget” road ourselves. See, our dev team works in Paris, and one of our favorite takeaway places is DeMets, which has the double advantage of changing their menu every day, and to publish it online, in good ol’ HTML.
That’s a widget opportunity not to be missed, and once again Maurice took upon himself to build the DeMets widget. We don’t have to visit the website anymore to know if the menu looks yummy or not: it’s right there on our own Netvibes page - or, speaking for myself, on my Dashboard screen. And, because I’m nice like that, here it is live:

Just so you know, it’s marked as having been installed more than 200 times already, which is more than developers we have in Paris. This goes to prove that local widgets are useful not only for yourself: build it and they will come! So don’t hesitate in front of the local website of your video-games reseller: if it can be useful it you, it will probably be to someone else in your city!

So build locale widgets and submit them to Ecosystem: local items are just as important as global ones, and everyone wants local informations coming directly to their desktop! That’s what UWA is for, and we hope to some cool widgets land on future updates of Netvibes’ local start-pages.

Let’s build the long tail of widgets!

Tags: idea, widget

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 6th, 2007 at 6:54 pm and is filed under Articles, Showcase. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.