Will Netvibes become THE highlighting tool?

Written on 1st July 2008                                                                                                              1 COMMENT
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

While the Netvibes blog still triumphs the neat integration with Google Search, TechCrunch reports that a new – and more exciting – feature has launched. It’s called Buzz and it adds Digg, Mixx, Reddit and Yahoo – uhm – Buzz to its impressive list of competitors (featuring iGoogle and MyAOL). In case you haven’t noticed yet, there’s a “star” function in Netvibes, with which you can highlight your favorite articles. Buzz will track which articles are starred most – by your friends or everyone – and by doing this, gives a Digg-like overview of the Web 2.0’s most favorite articles.

My first thought was: yet another sharing tool. But then I realized that Netvibes might become an “starring overlay” for all your content, as the little star is depicted in YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Digg, RSS, and almost every other content widget you can come up with. So instead of turning tweets in a Twitter fav, starring articles on Google Reader and appreciating Digg articles by digging them, you just have one tool to manage all your highlight needs.

Before this scenario becomes reailty, Netvibes Buzz has to come a long way. It’s still in development and the numbers on the frontpage aren’t that impressive.