Saturday, December 02, 2006

NetVibes Feed Aggregator


I stumbled upon this little doosey from New Musings. The guys' at NetVibes have a lot going for them.

They've created one heck of a feed aggregator, minus a few little trinkets. For starters, they've built-in the ability to export all of your feeds into an OPML file for easy transfer. Google doesn't have anything like that in IG, which makes it difficult to mirror IG with Google Reader.

Parparita at Persistent.info gave me a nice little addon though that generates each tab page on IG as an OPML, that's kind of nice. But it's still a pain to go to two different sites for different viewing options. NetVibes has aggregated both styles into a single place.


Another cool feature: you can check any of your email accounts, myspace account, and search for most of the major search engines directly from the site. It's basically the aggregators aggregator.

The downside of NetVibes: as far as I can tell, there's no easy way of erasing OPML files and starting over fresh. You have to manually delete everything, which can be a hassle if you have over a hundred feeds like me. (I know, I know, who has time to read that much.) Every time you add an OPML file, it doesn't give you the option of choosing between overwriting your current feeds or adding to them - it just adds.

Another thing it doesn't do, which Bloglines and IG don't do either, is seperate the OPML files in columns or tabs so that the OPML files themselves to be labeled and tagged. This feature would allow a whole new dimension of social bookmarking.

A little Web 2.0 trading feature could also allow people to essentially check the reading lists of bloggers who publish their OPML files on their sites. That'd be pretty sweet, enabling a whole new dimension of transparency and fact-checking.

Overall though, NetVibes has a lot going for them.