Netvibes, I've loved you since day 1, but you've been getting progressively worse and worse. Please, shake off your aspirations of ruling in the hot buzzword categories -- stop trying to be a social network, that's not why I use you, stop trying to be the end-all-be-all of widget embedding (ditto).

I don't really care about your new releases (Ginger, Coriander, paprika or whatever), I just want to be able to log-in every day and check my news feeds. I don't want to have to go through a painful "migration process" -- sounds like something taken out of an enterprise software book, definitely not suitable for a consumer product. And I don't want to have to request an invite to said migration process, get the email, input the invite into netvibes, begin migration, and have to wait hours until the migration is complete.

What I would like is if you fix your most basic bugs that have been there since day 1, instead of developing world-dominating features. The bugs that relate to your feed reader, the core of your product. Like the bug where when I have a feed open and the feed refreshes since I've had it open, the stories I click on display the story a few places up. Or the bug where about 50% of my feed will start the "Loading..." process, only to go completely blank -- the rest of my feed is ok though! Only half of it goes blank when it tries to load, the other half loads properly. That is especially annoying to me. Or the fact that hitting "refresh" on your feeds is flaky -- I usually have to reload the page if I really want to get a refresh.

I'd be the first to understand that everybody has their bugs. But before embarking on these huge feature releases, can you please fix the small things that have been there since the beginning?

EDIT: check out the comments on this blog post and this blog post -- looks like there are a lot of unhappy people.

 


Comments

odysensupport link
03/19/2008 18:25

Hi David,

If you're looking for an alternative to Netvibes, you should strongly consider Odysen at http://www.odysen.com. A couple of the key differences include 1) allowing you to integrate as many feeds as you want into a single news widget, 2) free-formatting widgets allowing you to make the widgets as large or small as you want, ie customize to the best fit for its appropriate content.

We also have multiple pages that can change the security from private, shared (ie with friends, family, & colleagues), or public.

There is also a blog available for recent updates and page examples at http://odysen.blogspot.com/.

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Tony link
06/20/2008 02:08

ya i agree...I liked Netvibes too..but man, it just has seemed to get slower and slower and slower as they try to incorporate more and more stuff...it's an easy trap to fall into i think...i stopped using them...just too darn slow...i have sympathy for them...as someone developing my very first website (RIGHT HERE ON WEEBLY!), I have to be careful I don't try and add every new cool widget thing out there and junk it up...gotta keep it clean, coherent, usable!

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