NetVibes, the startup that lets you assemble all your favorite widgets, feeds, social networks, email, videos and blogs onto a customizable homepage, is rolling out helpful “drag and follow” widgets for Facebook, MySpace and Twitter tomorrow.
NetVibes has offered Facebook, MySpace and Twitter widgets for some time now. Once you insert the respective widgets onto your NetVibes homepage, now you will be able to click on any friend, screen name or hashtag in the widget, then drag it outside and drop it on your page to create a new custom widget. The new widget will follow a person or topic. For example, you can take the stream of a news source or friend from Twitter and create a separate widget that tracks only their stream.
It’s certainly useful to navigate many different streams or threads at once. Especially if you are an active MySpace, Facebook or Twitter user, you can aggregate all the feeds onto one page as well as break out the feeds and searches that are most compelling to you, much like you can with many desktop Twitter clients..
Desktop clients like Tweetdeck and Seesmic, for instance, let you create breakout columns to filter feeds by user and search from Twitter. So if you regularly use a Twitter client, NetVibes’ page may be redundant. But the nice thing about the widgets are that they are small, and you can aggregate other info, like the weather, news feeds, RSS feeds and more onto one centralized page. NetVibes says that they will start using the drag and drop technology for search within other widgets in the near future. Competitors to NetVibes include Pageflakes and iGoogle. Last week at the TechCrunch’s Real Time Stream CrunchUp, Netvibes also previewed a new live feed reader and instant update architecture to make RSS real-time, which will be officially launched in the near future.
