Netvibes - More European Web 2.0
Posted on August 11, 2006
Filed Under European Web 2.0, New Tools, What's New |
Paris-based Netvibes has collected plenty of good Internet karma and like many Web 2.0 applications it’s clearly fun, sort of useful, and growing into a place where you could accomplish much of the information acquisition, contribution (e.g. digging articles) and organising that you need through the interface you like.
Why then do I remain sceptical? The answer is netvibes is a great site, product, service and is responding to user requests at a steady rate but in the end this is not the way I want to deal with information. Nor is it a technological response to the problematic and changing ways people and information interact.
That criticism is not confined to netvibes but let’s not get too general.
It seems to me the MySpace, Bebo phenomenon leaves Netvibes standing, and floundering, in terms of how people want to create a web presence. If all netvibes becomes is a home page solution then it’s going to provide a billboard for advertisers and then so what? There are plenty of those around.
Netvibes developers have to be thinking of more than that.
Providing a common platform for dealing with third party aggregators or news-sites like digg? There’s a role there clearly. If I could go to one place to blog, digg and contibute to newsites, great.
Right now I use flock to blog and I could use it to flickr and no doubt flock will be bringing out more capabilities making the browser my communications tool. Given that it is essential to being on the web, I would opt for my browser over a web service any day.
In terms of conceptualising a personal information space Netvibes is very much of the moment and that is its ultimate weakness - though I have to say that it is beautifully simple and it is only in Beta and there’s plenty of thinking still to do for its founders.
What do I mean by its ultimate weakness? What we know about the world of the web and computing in general is it draws a very stark distinction between the present and the past.
While the geek community thinks it brings us a form of artificial intelligence it in fact brings us artificial memory. In providing ultimate memory capacity it alters the ways we use our own memories in ways we haven’t yet figured out.
The web also seems to affect our perception of time. Google, we know, works best with past information, like newspaper archives. Information that has time to mature and be linked becomes a resource where once it was just a dump.
It seems to me entrepreneurs have yet to figure out what these two distinct elements of behaviour mean. On the one hand ultimate memory capacity and on the other burgeoning uses of historical data.
Now! What do web 2.0 applications like Netvibe give us? Plenty of surface, plenty of now. But they tap hardly at all into the more significant changes we are experiencing with memory and time.
That’s the reason fcor my scepticism. I think netvibes is great but it needs to tune into the past and to memory.
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[...] A story that scrapes away the Web 2.0 interface and obsession with the present to ask questions about the way we remember what we know and how much value Web 2.0 apps are in that process. It also looks at the way search engines rekindle past data but Web 2.0 apps don’t. Is there some fundamental conflict between the two?A story that scrapes away the Web 2.0 interface and obsession with the present to ask questions about the way we remember what we know and how much value Web 2.0 apps are in that process. It also looks at the way search engines rekindle past data but Web 2.0 apps don’t. Is there some fundamental conflict between the two?Netvibes - more European Web 2.0 [...]