5 Fine Things I Love About Netvibes

Whenever I can, I try to encourage friends and fellow bloggers to use Netvibes. I think it’s one of the coolest Web 2.0 app out there. So, in order to persuade them into using a feed reader, I also highlight other uses of Netvibes as a start page. Still, I’m interested in them using it as a feed reader so they could add me up on their feed list. :D

Here are 5 fine things I really liked about Netvibes and why I use it as my on-the-fly feed reader:

1) RSS Pagination. This is a really simple feature but I think is really nice especially if you just added a new feed. So, even if you limit your feeds to show the last 5 entries to save space, you can always hit the previous and next icons to breeze thru the old posts.

2) On-Page PodCast Player. Aside from displaying that cute little icon to identify if an entry is a podcast, it also has a built-in or on-page podcast player that shows up when you click the iPod icon. Now, you don’t need to run iTunes to listen to our BoBCast episodes.

3) Toggle Switch between Feed View and Website View. Who said one cannot enjoy the ambiance of a nicely done blog theme if you’re using a feed reader? With Netvibes, you can switch the default view of your subscriptions from Feed View to Website View and vice versa with just a single click. So, if the blog’s theme is ugly, stick to the feed list but if the theme is a beauty and will add to the overall reading pleasure, you can switch to the website view. Ain’t that sweet?

4) Bubble Excerpts. While you can set Netvibes to show a little detail on top of the post title list, you can actually pull up a summary or excerpt of the content by just hovering your mouse over the entry title of a feed. Less clutter, more real estate and a little bit of suspense.

5) Awesome Feed Search. What to know which blogs in your feed list mentioned you or your blog? Try the nifty feed search. It will arrange all your feed modules to highlight the searched keyword if they are in the title or display only the list of entry titles if the keyword is found in the body of the content. All the rest will just collapse in the box (grayed out) and hide from your plain sight. Flip the different tabs and the search term will still be in effect.

I hope I was able to convince at least one of you to try out Netvibes after reading this post. And if you do, don’t forget to add me on your feed list. :D