Netvibes starts website dedicated to open source projects

Netvibes’ chief architect François Hodierne announced the opening of netvibes.org, a website dedicated to Netvibes’ Open Source projects: “By giving away our technology, we hope to foster innovations in the widget and personal-page space, and launch a discussion about their wide implementation.” Netvibes widgets are based on UWA, the Netvibes Universal Widget API. ‘Universal’ since UWA-based widgets run on any platform that supports common Web standards (HTML/JavaScript/CSS). That means iGoogle too.

Netvibes.org is basically a sneak-preview of what’s really coming as the Netvibes developers need some more feedback before the project officially launches. Developers who want to give UWA a try, can work on three projects now:

• The UWA JavaScript Runtime: JavaScript libraries that make it possible to run UWA widgets
• The PHP Exposition libraries: make it possible to parse and compile UWA widgets
• The Exposition widget server: makes it possible to serve widgets to users, notably within an iframe.

I love the paradox of open source. Netvibes says it “gives away” their technology, yet they will probably never turn the personalized homepage into a open source project. Thus what Netvibes (and most other web companies do), is giving away little pieces of the technology – almost everything but the core technology -, so more service-related widgets will flood the web. That gives them a) a better image and b) more functionality.