All Netvibes users now smell like ginger

“The most important migration of netvibes history starts today” says Tariq Krim on the Netvibes blog. “We are moving all Netvibes users to Ginger.” The Paris-based personalized start-up service now also offers the new functions – such as your public page, new widgets and a social media flavor – to users who used to work on Coriander. So that means my non-geeky friends have to switch as well.

True party picture with
Tariq Krim last week

Together with Facebook and LinkedIn, Netvibes is one of the few services that my friends who don’t care about the latest developments in the Web 2.0 use. They don’t like Twitter, couldn’t care less about Friendfeed and have never heard of Flickr. Yet when I showed them my Netvibes page, they were immediately convinced about its advantages. I hope the new version doesn’t confuse them, as it offer a wealth of new features. Especially as Netvibes imitations that are totally focused on simple user-interfaces keep popping up. Have a look at Dutch service Symbaloo for example.

Yet I don’t want to get too negative here. Tariq and his team have done a great job. At last week’s Netvibes party he has told me what kind of effort the switch takes – like translating content to 140 different languages -, and that was rather impressive. Moreover, for people who are more web-savvy than average, Ginger is for sure a real improvement. It looks slicker, offers good and public aggregation of all your online content, and if you have the need, you can see what your friends are adding to their “Netvibes Universe”.

So be aware when you open Netvibes today…