I've always been one of those people who like a simple/useful home page (i.e. Google), and actually got a little pissed when Google decided to add a few extra links to a frame near the top of the page.   I've always looked at the homepages with a thousand RSS feeds, weather, news, email, IM, and dozens of widgets are all clutter and of no further use.  I've often felt that they were distractions for what you intended to do in the first place when you opened your browser.

I gave iGoogle an honest try for awhile, but reverted back to a blank search very soon thereafter.   But now I've decided to give netvibes a shot, they became successful at just this thing so surely they'll have something that will work for me right? ... we'll see.

So let's move right along to netvibes:

Alright, first impressions... this looks a bit like a pop-up - so far bad vibes.  :)

Good

• Was surprisingly easy to set up following signing up.   Immeadiately after you log in, you are presented with an option to customize the start page.  There are plenty of options you can add to your homepage, and anyone can have it set up within minutes.   For this reason, if a beginner were to ask for an easy to use homepage to list all their favorite information I could see myself reccomending netvibes to them in the future.
  
  
• Here is a screen shot from the object selection screen:
  
  
  
• Automatically places your local weather on your netvibes homepage based upon the location of your ISP (I'm guessing), and I figure this is probably the most common added feature, so it is useful to add this and configure it by default.
  
  
• Also on by default is a to-do list for adding simple notes of thing you need to do throughout the day.   I could easily see this being a real advantage of seeing everytime you open your web browser.   Of all the features in netvibes, it is something as simple as a to-do list that I can see being of the most use.   This is because of the very reason I gave for generally not liking adding anything but a search on the homepage, your to-do list is probably a good thing to be distracted by.
  
  
• The nodes are easily dragged and dropped, which act just like windows so the average user will be able to easily arrange their homepage.

Bad

• With the latest Firefox and Flash player (9-2-08), netvibes seems to give an error when adding new elements.  This happened three times, and I'm sure it will be fixed in the future... it is still nonetheless an annoyance.
  
  
  
  
• If you look two pictures up to the node/object/widget selection screen, you will notice the words 'sponsored'.   This is one thing that I do not like, the default option provided to users are all bought and paid for by these websites.  So in a sense you are getting paid advertisements on your homepage, advertisements that you've selected yourself, but advertisements nonetheless.   You can just as easily search for options using the search bar shown on the right, but I have a feeling the majority of users are using prominently displayed sponsor sites.
  

Vs. iGoogle
Both netvibes and iGoogle are very easy to set up, but if I were choosing between the two I would have to go with iGoogle.  This is simply a matter of preference, plus the fact that I use many of Google's online apps, and iGoogle integrates well with the rest of their apps.

It's hard to say one is altogether better than the other though.  Both have different looks and feels, and can help accomplish the exact same thing, so if you really want a homepage with all sorts of stuff, why not give both a solid week and choose for yourself.

I have a little experience with some of their competitors as well (PageFlakes, MyYahoo, MyMSN, iGoogle, Bubbletop), and can confidently reccomend both iGoogle and netvibes over all of them.   If you are currently using MyYahoo or MyMSN, please consider switching, you'll thank me later.

Final Thoughts

I started with about a dozen sites, and ended up simplifing that down as well.  In the end my netvibes homepage ended up looking like this:

I will say that after giving it an honest try, I can reccomend it to others, but will not continue using netvibes myself.   I feel that I can access those resources just as quickly by opening up some new tabs, and if I really needed an RSS Reader I would probably just use Sage from Mozilla Dev.

In the end I was sorting hoping that using one of these homepage sites would improve my productivity by allowing me to view multiple points of interest at once, but my suspicions about all the extra content being merely distractions was confirmed.   For this reason, I'm sticking with good old google.com (hey atleast I'm not using about:blank).

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