First Impressions: Netvibes Ginger

I was able to barge into the new (beta) release of Netvibes, called Ginger, thanks to Techcrunch’s invite codes. While I have to say that it is a pretty nifty piece of work, I don’t quite see the point to it. That said, I will readily admit that I am not your average user of online dashboards and desktops, so the basic premise of this post itself maybe flawed.

The loading time for the basic framework is quite fast, but actions that require data to be updated is sluggish. As it is to be expected with the beta label that Netvibes goes to great lengths to point out to you, it is a bit buggy and some of the links like featured widgets and top blogs did not load.

The Features:

Universe: The Universe is the public profile where the widgets the user has chosen to share turns up. I am a bit perplexed by what purpose the universe serves, other than to gun to be the preferred profile page for the user at a later stage.

Now, the “send to universe” feature kind of got me confused with the “share” feature, which happens at the item level of a widget. I still have not figured out where the share turns up. i assume it will show up a la Google Reader in your friend lists.

Themes: This is pretty much in the juvenile vein that iGoogle has managed to do it. But, unlike iGoogle, this does not get in the way of readability as much as the Google offering.

Activity Map: This is the online dashboard interpretation of the social graph (paging Scoble!) showing off what you shared last and what did your friends share last. And like any self-respecting web 2.0 website that makes social engineering by phishers a cakewalk, Netvibes too allows you to raid Gmail accounts to see which other friend of yours is a member of the website.

And that was just about all I could find on the website. At the end of it, the question that remained on my mind was this: What was the fuss all about anyway?