It's been a while since we've seen a compelling new browser start page. There was a real flurry of start pages a year or two ago when the likes of Google Personalized Start Page (now iGoogle), NetVibes, Pageflakes, and a myriad of other copycat sites launched. Strangely, even with such an amazing variety of start pages to choose from, we've never found any of them to be particularly compelling.

Then we were introduced to Feedly. Feedly is a start page that only works in Firefox, because it requires a Firefox browser extension to run. It's actually a locally hosted page that goes out and grabs information feed reader sites and social networks that you use, and presents it to you in a friendly magazine style layout.

Feedly can go through your Firefox bookmarks, as well as your My Yahoo! page, NetVibes, Bloglines, Twitter, FriendFeed, Yahoo! Mail, and Gmail accounts to find relevant information to present to you. If we can offer one tip, it would be to choose carefully. When setting up our page, we checked every possible option, and ended up with far too many feeds, and too many feeds that we had lost interest in that were still in some account somewhere that Feedly found.

Feedly also has a very tight integration with Google Reader, and anything that you read in Feedly will be marked as read in Google Reader, and vice versa. This is cool, but it's also dangerous, since and feeds that you add to Feedly (or that it finds) are automatically added to your Google Reader account. So again, choose carefully what feeds you want to be seeing in Feedly, as they will affect your Google Reader account.

But once it's all set up, Feedly is a very useful and elegantly done start page - so much so, that we haven't been compelled to remove it. And since no other start page has captured our interest, that's certainly something.

Netvibes Ginger is now open to the general public. Netvibes Ginger takes the personalized home page in a new, and more social, direction. Most of the new features in Ginger are designed to create a more social experience within your Netvibes home page: the ability to invite friends, a Netvibes Wall comments feature (similar to the commenting section on MySpace), the ability to share widgets with your friends, and much more.

Any registered Netvibes user will be prompted to upgrade to the release when you visit your main Netvibes home page (with the option to decline the upgrade, though we're not sure why such intrepid Download Squad readers as yourselves wouldn't want the latest and greatest).

If you don't have a Netvibes account, you can sign up and make the move into Ginger. Netvibes Ginger also includes basic performance improvements and some bug fixes.

Netvibes has just launched a private beta of its new iteration, Ginger. To those lucky few who were given an invite; now you must know how those kids who found Wonka's Golden Ticket felt. For the rest of us, Netvibes was kind enough to post a run-through of some of their pending and exciting features.

Netvibes has been one of the most popular and easy to use personal start pages for a long while (well, long in internet years; they're like dog years, you know). They offer tons of useful, ready to load widgets. Widgets include eBay, most popular online email accounts such as Yahoo! Mail and Gmail, Facebook, Digg, and many more. You can also insert any RSS feed and set up tabs for different content.

A few features upcoming in Ginger:

• Added 150 Premium Widgets
• Listen to your favorite web radio stations through Netvibes
• 2 GB of free storage space for every registered user
  

Ginger also looks poised to springboard into the next generation of the social internet. You can tag interesting blog posts, pictures, and video from your Netvibes page and then share them with your friends and family.

The official release of Ginger is in January. For now, you can check out Netvibes current release or visit the Ginger preview page.

[Via Cybernet]

Netvibes has been working on a way to give widget makers the ability to run their widgets on any widget platform, whether it's Vista, Mac Dashboard, Opera, iGoogle, or Windows Live. Now the fruit of their labor, the Universal Widget API, is in the wild, and it promises to increase exposure for widgeteers whose artful output was previously stunted because "it's not available for <x-widget-platform>".

Today, there are only about a thousand UWA-based widgets, but the number grows daily. Netvibes promises support for Yahoo Widgets in a forthcoming release, too. It makes us wonder if there's really such a thing as a killer widget, one that plays into the strengths of a particular desktop platform. Since most web widgets are RSS-based and limited in platform-specific functionality, we suspect most UWA widgets will be simplistic. So many widgets will likely still be limited to a particular platform, since they often have to talk to platform or app-specific applications in order to do their jobs, like, say an XBox remote control widget.

Personalized webpages are all business when it comes to the New York Times personalized My Times page.

Like other start pages, Netvibes, iGoogle, PageFlakes, MyYahoo and Windows Live, MyTimes allows users to pull in all of their important everyday RSS news and build a single resource. Widgets like weather, Flickr, stock quotes and crosswords can also be added to pages. Sections can be dragged around and reorganized like the other offerings as well.

Where MyTimes differs is that readers can choose to have their pages set up by Times journalists for news and entertainment. Offering a first hand look into their sources of information.

Facebook is the new meth. It's a harsh, seductive mistress that pulls in all ages and races and keeps them addicted, often crippling their social and professional lives. And while it's less dangerous than meth in the sense that very few house explosions have been directly caused by Facebook, most of the destruction comes from the fact that Facebook is available almost everywhere. And it seems a new dealer has entered the scene. Netvibes launched a new widget today that allows you to access your Facebook account through Netvibes.

While there are a few limitations - you can't access your news feed or change your status from Netvibes - overall it works pretty well. Some people have reported having some problems with it, but on the whole it seems to be functioning properly. Once you install it you can view your messages, pokes, friend requests and pretty most everything else. You might as well just go ahead and install it now. Face it, anything that gives you another way to tap into sweet lady Facebook is something you won't be able to resist. You're hooked. Pretty soon you're going to find yourself on the nerdiest episode ever of Intervention, and maybe we can get you the help you need. You have a problem

The proliferation of personalized start pages since the inception of "Web 2.0" seems to be increasing at an exponential pace. If you've got the feeling that your personalized start page just isn't giving you the features you feel you need, or you're simply wondering what all this nonsense about a personalized start page is all about, check out Mashable's overview and comparison of 14 of the most popular current personalized start pages.

The review features descriptions of what's to like and not to like about each of the offerings, but the cherry on top is the grid at the bottom of the article that compares each start page on a feature-by-feature basis.

If you are a big fan of custom start pages like the new MyYahoo, and a user of a POP mail account, you might get excited about a new feature Yahoo has added.

In iGoogle, you can only pull in your Gmail account, well, Yahoo thought hey, why not, let's make it so that any mail account can get imported into our customers start pages in the new MyYahoo. So they came out with the POP Mail module that launched yesterday; Pull in mail from any mail account, Yahoo or not, as long as it supports POP.

Yahoo also added in a Gmail module, because hey why not allow Google's Gmail users the ability to pull in their mail. If you want to get hooked up with the new My Yahoo beta that serves this content, sign up for an upgrade if you haven't already, and you'll be on your way. The page is clean and as easy to use at Netvibes. However, even though I enjoyed having the Gmail/POP modules preview my emails, when emails are clicked out to read more, you will have to sign into your email account. A little hassle, but that could be easily forgotten about. Yahoo is on their way to building a serious contender here, and it's definitely one you might want to consider. Netvibes is still a leader in this space, and is for sure a location that Yahoo and other "start pages" want to study when finding out what works, especially when it comes to a clean and uncluttered space. In other words, if My Yahoo got rid of that giant ad, and tightened up the top of the page so that we could fit in more content, it might get a little higher on the list.

MyYahoo has also updated their Scoreboard, Weather and Shopping modules.

Netvibes announced this week the launch of Netvibes Universe. Netvibes Universe allows users to create personalized home pages with widgets they select and now publish them for public use. Available widgets include things like RSS feeds, weather reports, Flikr Image searches, YouTube video searches and more. Publishers now also have the ability to add their own CSS and HTML to pages as well. Users can add public pages, or portions of public pages to their own page and stay updated on changes.

Personalized Universe's have already been set-up for a number of popular musical artists such as Moby, Ben Harper, 50 cent, and Mandy Moore as well news sites such as Forbes, Time, and Sports Illustrated.

CBS has launched four Netvibes Universes: CBS News, ShowBuzz, CSTV, and Sportslines which give users instant access to CBS video and news feed elements that they can then customize to fit their personal needs.

[Via TechCrunch]

Netvibes has announced a few colorful updates to their online service. The Coriander release brings with it improvements from numerous suggestions.

First off, Netvibes Coriander gets an improved RSS experience. Even though we really didn't think the old version was bad, Netvibes now has the ability to use multimedia content from blogs and news feeds without ever leaving the page. Listen to podcasts, view videos, and play games right on the start page.

Sharing customized Netvibes content is now pretty simple to do. Click on the arrow in your content feed window and choose whether you want to share the feed, module or widget via email, IM, or even drop it on a blog or website with some HTML code.

Maps now have a new search module in the Coriander release. Craigslist was brought on board in the first round of changes, and now there is a Map Comparison Search module that can be added to pages.

The final addition to the mix is the new personalization feature. Users can add a subtle touch to the Netvibes interface by changing colors of the module windows.

Everyone has been trying out Netvibes new mobile service that was just dropped, so I thought I would give it a go and see what all the hype was about; I was surprised at the results.

Netvibes, as you probably know, is an Ajax start page that allows you to plug in feeds and modules to import all of you important information, and have it all right in front of you without switching between different browser screens. The new mobile service allows users to grab their most important information and read it on their mobile device.

The folks over at Netvibes have been very busy as of late. In the last few weeks they've released 10 new international versions of their "customizable Web 2.0 home page/portal solution" (buzzwords aside, it's a terrific service). If you haven't given it a try yet, perhaps one these new versions will entice you: Greek, Turkish, Quebecer, Ukrainian, Russian, Danish, Canadian, Polish, Brazilian and UK.

If you want to help Netvibes to build a local version for your country, I'm sure they would be thrilled if you contact them.

Nowsy is feed reader that lets you add an unlimited number of feeds as panes on a personalized home page-style page. It has a clean, uncluttered interface but otherwise does little that will blow anyone away or make them switch from Netvibes or Google Personalized Homepage. For newshounds, however, it does have once nice feature: You can search among your feed items. Typing in a search term will filter your feed items so that only those items matching your search will show up. Though most decent feed readers have search or filter features, some users will prefer having their search results in this format. Nowsy also lets you create multiple pages, so you could have your feeds broken up by topic, etc. Nowsy lets you play around with most of its features without registration (via a cookie), but if you want to make sure your preferences are never lost you'll need to register.

Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but among all the personalized home page services, I think this is a first: Netvibes has added a module for their home pages that will show you new messages from your IMAP and POP3 e-mail accounts. The module allows you to customize the number of e-mail headings to show as well as specify a URL to link to a webmail account if you have one. This in addition to their preexisting Gmail and Yahoo! Mail support. Also new to me is Netvibes' Development Blog which is updated fairly constantly.