Not wanting to be left behind, Netvibes is adding a slew of social-networking features and integration with other social networks to its widget start page. Netvibes already supports a variety of desktop widget platforms, has its own Universal Widget API, and is part of Google’s OpenSocial movement. It is now combining all of these efforts, Tariq Krim announced today at a conference in Berlin (TechCrunch UK’s Mike Butcher has the details). NetVibes widgets will work with OpenSocial, Facebook, and desktop widget platforms on the PC and Mac.
The next version of Netvibes, codenamed Ginger, will also add a feeds feature called Flow, and a Friends tab so that you can follow your friends’ feeds and widgets as well. Krim explains in an e-mail from Berlin:
We are introducing social features . . . [so you] can share and follow widgets from your
friends or have a private flow to keep up a netvibes history.We will extend netvibes widgets to run natively on opensocial and
facebook. (By the way we are part of opensocial but we will work with
everyone else)We will launch a private beta for our developers in couple weeks.
It’s a big step as we have work to rebuild everything. It like our
leopard ;)
Here is our earlier Netvibes coverage. Here is a demo video of what Ginger will look like: