Netvibes has just been acquired by European product design company Dassault Systèmes (sure this isn’t the type of thing I usually write, but I like the founder Tariq Krim so bear with me here … ).

French startup Netvibes is a sentiment analytics dashboard that allows Fortune 500 companies to track their social media presence throughout the realtime web. Dassault is a “3D experience” design company — which lets designers virtualize how products will work in the real world — so the acquisition actually seems jarring at first, but Netvibes CEO Freddy Mini tells me that the buy actually makes sense in terms of connecting what people say about a product to its design process through the Netvibes dashboard.

“With the birth of the real-time Web, companies need to adapt to everything and everyone inside and outside their borders. To accomplish this, we need a way to connect and combine different products and uses, internal and external data sources, personal and professional apps, and human curation and algorithms—across all devices and departments, in real-time and in context,” Dassault Systèmes President and CEO Bernard Charlès wrote in a release.

“It is the synchronization of the outside world and the inside world into one world,” Mini said over the phone.

The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but Mini says that the deal made, “everyone happy” — in a French accent, of course.

TweetUp will be powering its search results with four new publishers, namely Business.com, Netvibes, Farlex’s online reference sites including TheFreeDictionary.com and TheFreeLibrary.com, as well as a number of (unnamed) newspapers.

Thanks to these agreements and previous ones, the Idealab-owned startup claims it can now serve over 250 million impressions via TweetUp search results, with a potential total reach of some 100 million unique users on a monthly basis.

In April, TweetUp opened registration for its bidded marketplace for real-time search, and in May the company launched its search capabilities on a number of sites at the TechCrunch Disrupt event, including here at TechCrunch, Topix.com, and Businessinsider.com.

TweetUp’s search algorithms and marketplace aim to address the needs of both users and tweeters in a single search mechanism. In addition to algorithms that combine a variety of factors to determine relevance, tweeters will soon be able to bid on keywords in a marketplace very similar to what now occurs at search engines.

It’ll be interesting to see if Gross can make even half the impact he did with GoTo / Overture (acquired by Yahoo 7 years ago almost to the day), which pretty much invented the sponsored search model.

Sure enough, these distribution partnerships are an essential part of the TweetUp road map.

Netvibes, which has been making start pages more personalized and more ‘real-time’ for users for years now, is working on an iPad application website.

The alpha version of the site will be available later today (screenshot below), but users will have to wait a couple of more weeks for the launch of the more polished version (screenshot above). The site you’ll be able to visit later today will not enable people to create or edit Netvibes accounts and won’t allow users to share content via Twitter, Facebook and the like, among other limitations.

What both versions will have, is synchronization with the Netvibes desktop version. That means users will be able to from their desktop or notebook computer to the iPad and continue to consume content, while already read and unread posts will be marked as such on both.

Truth be told, I think this iPad-specific site will be appealing to existing users, but there are a bunch of dedicated feed readers out there for the iPad that offer mostly the same, if not a better, experience than what Netvibes will have to offer. Check for example the Pulse iPad app, created by two Stanford grads, that I recently wrote about.

I’m also left wondering why Netvibes isn’t looking at creating experiences for iPhone and Android first (they tell me they’ll come, eventually).

The dashboard is essentially a way for users to track content on the realtime web. For example, if I create a dashboard for Tiger Woods, NetVibes will aggregate videos from Google search, news from Google news, photos from Flickr, realtime search results from Yahoo, Tweets about Woods and more.

Users can browse content within their Instant Dashboard using the Netvibes Smart Reader, which lets people view real-time content in magazine-style widgets or in a flowing RSS reader. Dashboards can be personalized and users can also add more content from the Netvibes widget and content ecosystem, which includes a plethora of RSS feeds and widgets from social networks and content platforms.

NetVibes has transformed its product since its launch five years ago. The startup began with personalized homepages, became a distributed widget platform, changed CEOs (when founder Tariq Krim stepped down in 2008 to start Jolicloud), then started appealing to enterprises, brands, and advertisers with intranet offerings and social media dashboards.

And the startup just hit profitability on a net income basis, with revenue from enterprise offerings comprising most of sales. NetVibes offers an enterprise version of dashboards for PR and marketing professionals, which pulls together different monitoring and analytics tools (such as Google Trends, Compete, Yelp, Hootsuite, and Trendrr) all into one dashboard.

Netvibes Showcase from Netvibes on Vimeo.

Netvibes CEO Freddy Mini announced today that the startup founded five years ago has finally made it to profitability. The site has seen a lot of changes since then. It began as one of the original Web 2.0 personalized homepages, became a distributed widget platform, changed CEOs (when founder Tariq Krim stepped down in 2008 to start Jolicloud), then started appealing to enterprises, brands, and advertisers with intranet offerings and social media dashboards.

I chatted with Mini today, who says that the company is profitable on a net income basis. He won’t go into details on revenues, but the company has 40 employees and two offices. Just to cover salaries, it’s got to be pulling in a few million dollars a year. Mini did break down the revenues by product line, however:

Netvibes for Enterprise: 50%
Netvibes Premium Dashboards: 40%
Widget Distribution: 10%

The enterprise version, which accounts for half of the company’s revenues, lets employees customize their intranet homepage with a mixture of company and personal widgets. Think iGoogle for businesses. The dashboards are more for advertising and PR agencies, who can use them to push media on an opt-in basis to interested consumers. Netvibes also recently launched a Dashboarding Guide, which is a “dashboard of dashboards,” says Mini. It pulls together different monitoring and analytics tools (such as Google Trends, Compete, Yelp, Hootsuite, and Trendrr) all into one dashboard.

The consumer-oriented homepage now has 3.5 million visitors a month, and Netvibes continues to improve that experience with its new realtime stream reader Wasabi, but that the paying customers are businesses.

We recently reviewed Wasabi, Netvibes’ powerful new stream reader which consolidates news feeds, blogs, Twitter and Facebook streams, email, and more in an extremely manageable interface. The site entered private beta recently and we have 200 invites for TechCrunch readers. To get an invite, visit Wasabi and enter the code “WASABITC.”

As we wrote earlier, Netvibes CEO Freddy Mini demonstrated parts of Wasabi at our first Realtime CrunchUp in July. In addition to the traditional widget view, which breaks up your feeds and applications into a grid of boxes on your Netvibes homepage, Wasabi now also has a “smart reader” view. The smart reader borrows from traditional RSS readers in that all the feeds and widgets you subscribe to are presented together in one column, updated in reverse chronological order.

You can see just a list of headlines, or an expanded view with the full feed. It looks similar to Google Reader, except that Netvibes supports more than just RSS feeds. You can import your Twitter and Facebook streams (read-only right now), as well as Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Flickr photos, weather widgets, stock widgets, and more. Plus, Wasabi has also sped things up to make the stream as realtime as possible. It is caching content from the most popular feeds and pushing that down to users as soon as there are any updates, and it will also be supporting both the Pubsubhubbub (PuSH) and RSSCloud standards aimed at eliminating the lag time inherent in RSS and Atom feeds.

Netvibes, original widget homepage, is morphing into something much more interesting. The next version of the service, dubbed Wasabi, is a potent stream reader which consolidates news feeds, blogs, Twitter and Facebook streams, email, and much more in an extremely manageable interface. Wasabi will become available early next week in a private beta, but you can start signing up for it now.

CEO Freddy Mini demonstrated parts of Wasabi at our first Realtime CrunchUp in July. In addition to the traditional widget view, which breaks up your feeds and applications into a grid of boxes on your Netvibes homepage, Wasabi now also has a “smart reader” view. The smart reader borrows from traditional RSS readers in that all the feeds and widgets you subscribe to are presented together in one column, updated in reverse chronological order.

You can see just a list of headlines, or an expanded view with the full feed. It looks similar to Google Reader, except that Netvibes supports more than just RSS feeds. You can import your Twitter and Facebook streams (read-only right now), as well as Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Flickr photos, weather widgets, stock widgets, and more. “Any service that has a stream we can display it,” says Mini.

Rather than scan across 20 boxes, Netvibes users will now have the option to mash everything together and filter simply by what’s been posted most recently. Wasabi has infinite scroll, so you can keep going down until you’ve had enough. There is also a new mosaic view, which shows each item as a visual tile. When you click on a tile, you get an expanded view that allows you to read the item, while keeping a strip of navigational tiles up top (see screenshots below).

On the backend, Netvibes is speeding things up to make the stream as realtime as possible. It is caching content from the most popular feeds and pushing that down to users as soon as there are any updates, and it will also be supporting both the Pubsubhubbub (PuSH), which also launched at the Realtime CrunchUp, and RSSCloud standards aimed at eliminating the lag time inherent in RSS and Atom feeds.

So Wasabi is not only a potent stream reader, it is faster too. I won’t miss the widget view one bit.

Photo credit: YouTube/FatoosVanRobin.

Its new Premium Dashboards product gives publishers the ability to push out new content and site changes, while at the same time giving users on the other end some control over what they want to see from these changes. Regular Dashboard members will be told that there are new updates available (just as you would be with your computer operating system) and are asked to update. But Premium Dashboard members can pick and choose which updates to accept or reject.

This seems like a smart play from both Netvibes and its publishers perspective because most users are probably going to choose to accept whatever changes are being pushed towards them. But at the same time, they’ll know in the back of their minds that they do have a choice not to, which is always reassuring. And this whole process maintains the simplicity that leads publishers to choose Netvibes in the first place.

I also like that the demo they sent us is using Chromium for Mac, which is of course, the unreleased and unfinished Mac version of Google Chrome. Ballsy.

I find myself relying on traditional feed readers less and less these days (stream readers like TweetDeck and Seesmic have replaced them as an hourly habit). But when I do look at my feeds, I like to look at them through Feedly, which presents the stories in a visually appealing, magazine-like layout. Feedly is a Firefox plug-in that lets you import all of your blog and news feeds from Google Reader (or from your bookmarks, Netvibes, or Bloglines).

Today it will be releasing Feedly Explore, the latest version of its reader. The main new feature is an explore page which helps people discover new blogs to read by highlighting celebrity reading lists, staff picks, and sources based on popular tags.

You can also put in your own search term, and Feedly will deliver the most recent results from both your sources and other blogs, as well as YouTube, Flickr, Amazon, and Crunchbase. It also searches your Twitter and FriendFeed streams.

For any topic you search for, it also provides a list of “featured sources” which are the most authoritative blogs on the subject. And if you do a search from the new Explore page, you get a preview of the feed for each of the top sources, ranked by number of subscribers. It also tells you how many articles a week come out on that particular feed and how many recommendations it has. Any feed can be subscribed to with one click from within Feedly, of course.

The new discovery features are an added bonus, but the big draw for me remains the visual layout and Feedly’s ability to assemble it on the fly. It just makes the news easier to scan. Netvibes is doing similar things with turning feeds into something you actually want to read. The next step I’d like to see is some sort of alert, a glowing red button maybe, indicating different levels of hotness based on the attention any given story is getting both within these readers and elsewhere.

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 a new feature today that lets users create personalized widget-based web pages. NetVibes’s tool, called Theme Publishing, is a visual design editor that lets users personalize and edit every part of their page’s’ theme, from images to background.

The layout of the editing tool is fairly simple. Users “click and pick” on the page:, meaning they click which part they want to edit and pick options from a color palette and design option menus. NetVibes offers a directory of themes or you can create your own theme. You can also publish your theme to the gallery for other NetVibes members to use. Every change is shown live in a preview pane, making it easy to see how a particular design will look. Plus, users can add widgets, feeds, social networks and more to their pages. The bonus: it’s all free.

While the new feature is sure to attract users, it is also likely to attract the attention of brands. NetVibes says that ad agencies, including Ogilvy and Razorfish, are already using NetVibes’ theme design tool to create interactive, uber-personalized microsites for clients that are branded and contain customized widgets for social networks and feeds. NetVibes is also offering a new XML-based Theme API, which will enable web designers to create animated themes on their pages.

The startup recently launched “drag and follow” widgets for Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, making it easy to create custom widgets around followers or feeds. Although NetVibes was a pioneer in personalized widget homepages, it has since been overshadowed by iGoogle. At TechCrunch’s Real Time Stream CrunchUp in July, Netvibes previewed a new live feed reader and instant update architecture to make RSS real-time, which will be officially launched in the near future.

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.

I’m sorry, but RSS feeds are way too slow. I know this first-hand. As part of my job here at TechCrunch, I monitor a lot of RSS feeds for breaking news. We also produce our own feed and I can see how quickly it propagates to various feed readers and feed-powered news aggregation services. The lag time between posting a story and seeing it pop up in the RSS feed is usually a few minutes, and then it can take another 10 to 15 minutes or so for it to appear in something like Google Reader. And the TechCrunch feed is probably checked more frequently for updates than most other feeds. In our business, every second counts and RSS just isn’t cutting it.

While there is an argument to be made that RSS is dying, being replaced by more instantaneous forms of content delivery such as Twitter and other real time streams, many people aren’t quite yet ready to give up on it. Instead, they want to save it by speeding it up. Tomorrow, at our Real Time Stream CrunchUp, we will see three demos of projects that do just that in slightly different ways.

Google engineers Brad Fitzpatrick and Brett Slatkin will show a demo of a new push protocol called pubsubhubbub, Netvibes CEO Freddy Mini will demo his similar RSS Instant Update Hub, and WordPress engineer Andy Skelton will show off a Jabber client which uses the XMPP protocol to push blog headlines into an IM-like environment faster than RSS.

The pubsubhubbub and Netvibes technologies create RSS hubs, which push out feeds as soon as they are available. This approach is in contrast to the polling method which is the foundation of RSS. The polling method sucks because it requires the server acting on behalf of the RSS subscriber to constantly ping the server where the RSS feed is published to ask if there is anything new yet. Depending on how often this happens, you end up with a lag. As communications become more real-time, this lag is becoming more noticeable.

The way pubsubhubbub fixes this is by putting an RSS Hub in the middle which more efficiently pushes out the feeds to the servers subscribing to them. It is an open protocol and can be applied to any existing RSS or Atom feed, as well as other real time streams. If you think about the Twitter firehose that everyone wants access to, this approach lets anyone create their own firehose for different types of data streams. It is more of a federated approach. You can think of these RSS Hubs as a content delivery network of sorts for RSS feeds, similar in concept to what Akamai does for video streams.

Netvibes is creating its own proprietary version of this for its own service, which it is developing independently. It is called the RSS Instant Update Hub. All of those widgets on your Netvibes page today take forever to load because they each have to fetch the underlying feeds of data. The Instant Update Hub will cache and push these feeds automatically so that the widgets load faster and they update continuously without requiring a refresh. Any data stream that is supported by a Netvibes widget today, which goes well beyond RSS, will be pushed through the Instant Update Hub. It will also form the basis for a new stream reader which Netvibes will introduce later this year as an alternative to its current widget grid and magazine-style layouts (see screenshot below).

The WordPress Jabber client uses a different push technology, XMPP, to speed up RSS. The effect is that headlines pop up like instant messages. Jabber is mostly used for IM clients such as Gtalk, but WordPress is using it as a feed reader and micro-blog publisher. The great thing about it is that it is two-way. In the demo, Skelton will show how the Jabber client can be used as an interface to to post directly to your blog. Feed reading and blog posting can all be done from the same place in a more real-time fashion. The Jabber client can also be used as a blog commenting system and embedded as a widget directly into a Web page, turning comments into more of a chat room.

What we are seeing is the world’s of publishing and IM colliding. The faster we can close the loop between publish and response, the more we are going to see real-time data streams take on the look and feel of public IM systems. Twitter is asynchronous, but it often feels immediate with back and forth conversations sometimes happening almost fast as a private IM chats. That is just a taste of things to come, as all publishing platforms get up to speed.

(Photo credit: Flickr/joiseyshowwa)

Here’s the video from PubSubHub’s demo at the Real-Time event:

For those of you who need more information widgets in your life, Netvibes is adding widget recommendations to its homepage service. It just started rolling this feature out today, and all Netvibes users should see it within the next two or three days. It looks at all of the information widgets on all the pages and tabs in your account, compares that to other members with overlapping taste, and suggests content they have that you don’t.

When users click on the “add content” button on the top left, a “Recommended” option will appear below the widget search box. Clicking on that will generate 12 new widget recommendations across nine categories of interest: news, sports, business, technology, entertainment, shopping, lifestyle, games, and travel. Netvibes is calling this new widget recommendation and distribution feature Talk To Me.

When I tried it, most of the recommendations were for news, since the way I use Netvibes is to scan dozens of blogs and news feeds on a single page. The recommendations, at least for me, were a bit too predictable: WSJ blogs, the Financial Times, The LA Times, CBS News. (Click above for a larger image). These are all things I could have found myself. But the recommendations are suppose dto get better over time, learning from what you add and what you reject.

Netvibes is in the widget business, so it needs to encourage more consumption of widgets. It will also be showing targeted sponsored widgets in the same window, marked accordingly, and it gets paid every time someone installs those widgets on a cost-per-install basis.

I personally have moved on from widgets to more linear streams of data as my information consumption habit of choice, but a lot of people still like widgets (see, iGoogle). Most widgets are really just a different way to package streams of data such as news or Twitter feeds. On Netvibes, you arrange them in boxes on your page, and can organize multiple pages in tabs, and even go beyond that. But at a certain point you stop adding new widgets just like you stop adding new feeds to your RSS reader because you don’t know what else to add or it simply becomes overwhelming. A good recommendation system could help you discover new widgets, but what is equally important is a way to clean up the widgets you added long ago but never bother to look at. Recommending what to get rid of is just as important as recommending what to add. But that is not part of the system yet.

The feature, dubbed MyAlltop, lets users create a custom page with a so-called vanity URL (e.g. my.alltop.com/techcrunch) where they can add feeds from a variety of topics and display all the widgets on one page, which can then be shared with others. All users need to do is register and add feeds to their public pages by clicking a small plus sign displayed next to feed widgets.

I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right. Personalized start pages like Netvibes, iGoogle, PageFlakes, etc. have been around for years, and they pretty much all offer the above and much more. MyAlltop only lets you grab feeds that are already on Alltop, so no custom widgets for you (tough luck if you wanted to insert your mom’s blog). Furthermore, Alltop doesn’t have a decent search function, which makes it very hard to look for sources to add unless I’m 100% certain they will be in a specific category. With 31,000 sources in 550 topics, they’re hurting themselves not to make search a priority instead of launching new features like MyAlltop.

For example, I can’t find our sister site MobileCrunch anywhere on Alltop (not even in the Mobile category), so that pretty much blocks me from creating a public TechCrunch presence on Alltop with all our feeds in it. All I could do at this point is notify Alltop that there’s a great resource on all things mobile missing in the pre-defined category list of feeds and hope that they add it. Personalization it ain’t.

You could of course claim that Alltop takes the hassle out of having to locate the RSS feeds of your favorite sources and go through a few steps in order to add them to any personalized feed reader, but how much of a problem is this really? I think it’s a bit of a stretch to claim MyAlltop simplifies creating a custom feed reader because it already has been dead simple for many years. In my opinion, anyone who thinks the process of personalizing your RSS feed reading experience with Netvibes or iGoogle is cumbersome will probably feel the same way after trying MyAlltop.

Here’s a video about Alltop (the new feature is explained a bit in the end):

Netvibes founder Tariq Krim sent me a new screenshot of Jolicloud, the Linux-based Netbook-optimized operating system he’s building (we first covered Jolicloud last December).

The screen shot, which is significantly evolved from what we saw in Paris, shows a set of featured applications that mixes desktop and cloud software – Facebook, Skype, Meebo and Youtube, among others, are shown with large icons that make it easier on Netbook users, who have to make do with smallish screens.

Jolicloud will eventually support touchscreens, Krim told me. We’re trying to get a copy and install it on our CrunchPad prototype to see how it does, and share video.

The widget is ready for its closeup. Today at the LeWeb conference in Paris, Netvibes announced a major step forward in how widgets are presented on a start page. Instead of the standard jumble of boxes filled mostly with text-only feeds, Netvibes members can now arrange the different widgets they subscribe to in different layouts that help to break up the page. And within a given widget, they can choose different viewing options for how they see each feed, including carousel view, magazine, streaming ticker, and normal text-headline views.

Maybe I’m just excited about this because I’m a former magazine guy, but I always thought Netvibes and most other start pages were way too ugly. The problem with start pages, visually, is that once you add more than a dozen or so feeds, all the boxes meld together and it becomes difficult to see at a glance what has changed. Simply changing the layout to emphasize more important feeds, and then tweaking the look of adjacent widget boxes, makes it much more pleasurable to read.

Netvibes is not alone in thinking about how to present collections of widgets in a more graphic way. In October, Google added its wide, canvas view to iGoogle gadgets. Just because information is coming from different sources doesn’t mean that it cannot benefit from a well designed layout.

To change the layout of an entire page within Netvibes, you click on the option pull-down menu arrow on each tab and pick your layout. To change the layout of an individual widget, you click on “edit” within that widget, and then pick the view you want. (You can read more details on this Netvibes blog post). Netvibes pulls images from the feeds as well, although they tend to be a little fuzzy.

And a year after promising to do so, Netvibes is now finally supporting OpenSocial. Any widget created with its Universal Widget API can be turned into an an OpenSocial app. The developer sandbox to test OpenSocial apps will be here. (Last month, Netvibes implemented Facebook Connect features that lets users share any feed item, widget, or tab with friends on Facebook, or on Twitter as well).

The two (silent) videos below show the new tab and widget layout options and how they look:

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=2465453&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=00ADEF&fullscreen=1
Netvibes : Flexible Layout from Netvibes on Vimeo.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=2465420&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=00ADEF&fullscreen=1
Netvibes : Feed views from Netvibes on Vimeo.

Netvibes, the site that lets users customize their homepages with a variety of widgets, has partnered with Rambler.ru to bring its widgets to the massive Russian web portal. Rambler is the Yahoo of Russia, with an estimated 40 million users and 3 billion monthly pageviews. The deal is being described as “multi-year” and worth “multi-millions”, but further details haven’t been disclosed. Netvibes availability on Rambler.ru is expected to begin in November.

This marks the first time Netvibes has licensed its platform for installation and distribution to an independent third party, and probably won’t be the last. In order to stay competitive with other widget hubs like iGoogle, Netvibes would do well to spur its growth by offering its widgets to other region-specific portals (that said, Netvibes has been doing well, with a reported 500 million widgets served montly). According to the press release, the Rambler homepage will include Google Search, Blinx video search, and a number of Russian services like Price.ru.

In July Google acquired Begun, a contextual ad service, from parent company Rambler. As part of the $140 million deal, Rambler has been using Google for some of its advertising and search functions.

If Netvibes is getting old and you’re tired of looking at your desktop to find all your favorite apps, Schmedley might be a worthwhile alternative.

Leading up to its public beta next week, Schmedley is offering 5,000 private beta invites for TechCrunch readers who want to take the site for a spin. The premise is simple: you sign up and get brought to your start page, which can be littered with well-designed widgets that let you search Google and Yahoo at the same time, check up on your Twitter feed, work with Facebook, check your stocks, and much more, without surfing to the respective sites.

Schmedley offers a full range of widgets to add to your page and each can be expanded or removed with a click of the mouse. The design is quite appealing and the general uniformity of the widget designs improves the experience, but considering the popularity of Netvibes, it’ll be interesting to see how Schmedley can compete.

If you want to try Schmedley out, click here. If not, you won’t have to wait long before its public beta: it starts on October 1.

It is hardly surprising that FeedBurner’s subscriber numbers can be faked. What is surprising is how easy it is to do so. As the video above shows, all you need is a Netvibes account. The folks at the Next Web in Amsterdam took a blog with 43 subscribers and turned that into 2,500 overnight simply by creating an OPML file with the same feed copied 2,500 times and pasting it into their Netvibes page. The result was 2,500 widgets of the blog feed, which FeedBurner counts as separate subscribers.

Why does this matter? Blogs like to tout how many RSS subscribers they have because, even if it is a smaller number than direct visitors to their site, it represents their most loyal readers. That’s why we display how many RSS readers we have in the Feedburner chicklet at the top of TechCrunch (currently 850,000). For these numbers to have any meaning, though, they cannot be as easy to game as the video shows. (And, no, we don’t game our numbers).

You’d think that Google would be smart enough not to double-count these things, or at least ask Netvibes and other widget start pages to de-duplicate the numbers for them by user. What appears to be happening here is that FeedBurner counts each widget for a particular feed on Netvibes as a separate subscriber, regardless of whether that widget is on ten thousand different user pages or repeated ten thousand times on the same page. The same thing happened a couple years ago with Pageflakes.

Update: Netvibes VP of Product Development Franck Mahon responds in comments that it is working to fix the problem of duplicates, but that there are other ways to “hack the numbers.” And he notes that it might be more useful to count active subscribers than just people who may have added a feed two years ago and never read it.

Netvibes users can star any of the links they like on their homepages, RSS readers, YouTube boxes, Digg widgets, and other widgets. And when items have been starred, they show up in users’ public activity streams, which can be displayed on home pages using an activity widget. With Buzz, these starrings are aggregated and displayed on a Digg-like front page where people can see what others are starring the most.

Buzz hasn’t been formally announced yet, but this is the first new feature we’ve seen since Tariq Krim announced he was stepping down from his CEO position.

While Netvibes lags behind giants iGoogle, My Yahoo! and MyAOL, it is the favorite among many early adopters for being fast and ad-free. With 2.4 million worldwide uniques in May, it makes sense to leverage its traffic for a link popularity tracker. There are already many social bookmarking sites, but adding a feature like this to an already-popular personalized home page service makes for easy adoption.

Buzz is currently on a separate page (and probably still in development), but we expect Netvibes to provide users with a widget that can be used to track popular items on their home pages. The name choice probably won’t go unnoticed by Yahoo either.