A teeny, tiny company called Netvibes launched a nice, drag-and-drop, AJAX heavy, combination feed reader and customizable home page.
It is quite similar to My Google, MSN's Start.com, and My AOL, all of which try to be easier versions of the venerable My Yahoo.
Normally with all these giants in the space, a very similar product from a little startup wouldn't be worth talking about. But Netvibes gets a lot of things right. The default page is very clean. It's easy to add feeds, including importing an OPML list, and the UI strikes me as more intuitive and less awkward than the competition.
Unfortunately, the big guys will shamelessly copy the good lessons from this quickly. But, it's some nice work by web developer Florent Fremont and well worth a peek.
All five of these products have the problem Bloglines CEO Mark Fletcher pointed out that they don't track things that you read and don't show you what's new. As Mark says, it's important to know where to focus your attention so you don't waste time.
[via TechCrunch]
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I use a similar service called Protopage which is the most customizable start page service I've seen yet. They're currently developing version 2.0 and requesting feedback - tell them what you want and you'll probably get it. They'll be doing RSS soon too.
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