Netvibes Ginger open for the masses

Written on 4th March 2008                                                                                                              COMMENT
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Since the 100 private beta invites we offered you a few weeks ago were gone in less than an hour, lots of you guys will be glad to hear that Netvibes launches the Ginger version today.

Ginger not only looks good, it has several interesting new features. CEO and founder Tariq Krim pitched the service when we were in Paris this month, showing us this:

Your Digital Life All in One Place: less surfing time since almost literary every service offers a Netvibes widget.
Activity Streams: follow your friends to see what they’re adding to their page, like new pictures and videos.
Your Universe: gather everything you want to share with the world on this page. An easy way for not the not so web-savvy people out there to create their own digital space.

Krim in a press release: “Imagine sharing the entire spectrum of your digital life, from your Flickr photos to your Facebook and MySpace friends, YouTube videos, favorite blogs and news sites, widgets and more, all from a single page that your friends and family can easily enjoy and personalize. We’ve gone from the personalized private page to the personalized public Universe.”

So the big picture here is that Netvibes wants to create a community with Ginger. Therefore they’ve made it easy to import friends and contacts from Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Flickr, Gmail and Yahoo Mail accounts. I guess Ginger will be really viral, since a lot of those millions of users won’t be able to resist the temptation of easy friends importing.