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In Search of the Perfect Web PageHow Netvibes helped me cram the whole Internet onto a single screen.

By Reihan Salam
Posted Monday, April 23, 2007, at 2:15 PM ET

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(Continued from page 1)

(You can find the Last.fm player here.)

Once I started adding feeds and modules and tabs, there was no going back to my old surfing habits. With seven tabs filled to the brim with dozens of RSS feeds, Netvibes is now my Web nerve center. Not only can I read all of my favorite blogs—I can listen to my Last.fm radio station from my Netvibes page, or find photos of Brooklyn, or monitor blog posts on the 2007 Cricket World Cup. I open Netvibes as soon as I fire up my browser, and I close it only when I'm about to head out the door. Pretty soon I noticed that I wasn't foraging around the Web quite as much, and I had saved a fair bit of time in the process.

Netvibes isn't perfect. All those modules take precious seconds to load, even with a blazing-fast broadband connection. Also, keep in mind that most Netvibes modules are user-created, and they can be slightly buggy. The comment thread on this Google Talk module, for instance, is filled with complaints. A complaint of my own: When I switch from one tab to another, my fancy Last.fm player shuts down. This is very frustrating, to say the least.

There's an even bigger problem: If you subscribe to billions of blogs, each with their own RSS feed, Netvibes can be a pain. Each blog has its own little module, and so far I haven't figured out an easy way to read all of the items from all of my blogs in a single view. That's why I'm still using my superconvenient Google Reader as a fallback. And that ain't good news for Netvibes.

So, Netvibes isn't exactly the home page of my dreams. But it's getting there. All those quirky, buggy modules are getting better, smoother, and more sophisticated. Unlike the tools you add to Google Homepage or My Yahoo, Netvibes modules have a consistent, clean look. Most important, you get the sense that Netvibes wants to unite all warring tribes—Amazon and eBay, Google and Yahoo, dogs and cats, Sanjaya and Simon—under a single Ajax-enabled roof. Call me crazy, but I think they're going to pull it off.

(Disclosure: Slate is one of many media organizations that has partnered with Netvibes to create a branded home page.)

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Reihan Salam is an editor at the Atlantic and a fellow at the New America Foundation.
Photograph of man using a computer on Slate's home page by Digital Vision/Getty Images.
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