Netvibes – RSS for the Rest of Us
The acronym RSS has always been a little confusing to me. I see it just about everywhere that I go on the Internet yet never quite saw the point. That all changed when our co-editor Rob Hindman introduced me to Netvibes. Netvibes is essentially a web-based RSS reader and aggregator and I know that sounds a little confusing all on its own but I will do my best to simplify it.
RSS means a number of things but its most common definition is Really Simple Syndication. Basically, RSS is a way to see just the headlines of the most recent articles and stories from your favorite websites, blogs and podcasts. It allows you to decide if you want to read a certain article without actually having to visit the site first. It can be a time saver, as well as a time-waster if you aren’t careful. You could find yourself reading all kinds of articles that you would have never seen before.
Netvibes will pull together all of your RSS feeds into one location. You simply add the feeds that you want and Netvibes will pull in all the latest headlines. It will update constantly throughout the day ,thus keeping the information from getting stale. I have Netvibes set as my default homepage so it launches when I start my browser and it is very fast, pulling in feeds from sites as disparate as ESPN.com and ComicBookResources.com. Yes, I love sports and comics, who knew? Just about every news and information site as RSS feeds and Netvibes will even try to find the feed for you, making it super simple to add new content.
In addition to RSS feeds, Netvibes will allow you add your GMail, Yahoo or Hotmail e-mail, local weather, and tons of other information. This makes it a highly flexible and useful tool and saves you from visiting all of your favorite sites every day. New features are being added constantly as it is being actively developed. And the best part of it all is that it is a free service. What can be better than that?
February 19th, 2008 at 3:11 pm
[...] If you haven’t come across a page like this before it’s worth checking out – very useful for ordering all of the information that flies at you every day – saves alot of time accessing different sites. Here’s a good explanation as to how it works. [...]