The Echoes of an Internet Recluse

This is completely awesome.

This shows why Japanese malls are currently superior to their American counterparts. I wonder what it’d take to get this for your house?

This is quite possibly the funniest thing I have seen in a very long time.

Very very long time.

So, I’ve not actually heard anything about his before, well, five minutes ago, but apparently there’s a feud between a video blogger on Politico (Koteki) and a show on MSNBC (Schuster). The entire thing seems to have its tongue firmly planted in its cheek, but still managed to be amusing.

Video clip of the supposed feud:

For the past year or so, Apple has decided that the standard for sorting in anything involving computers (numbers first, then letters) is stupid, and decided for iTunes and any iPods that are synced through iTunes, you now have to have that standard reversed. Pointless? Yes. Confusing? Definitely. Frustrating? Enough for me to figure out a way to fix it.

Enter SharePod.

SharePod is not necessarily unique in the field of “Alternate iPod Managers”, but so far for me it has worked the best with the minimal amount of configuration. (None.) If you want to delete songs from your iPod, load songs, or even copy songs from your iPod back to your computer, SharePod can do all of this, and can do it faster than iTunes can.

Unlike the one other iPod manager I’ve looked into (ephPod) SharePod automatically finds all connected iPods and loads them without any configuration necessary. This is especially helpful when aiding non-technical friends and family on how to either add new music to, extract music already on, or otherwise modify your iPod in any way.

Okay, so it’s a month or so late. Whatever. I’m finally getting around to actually writing up a review of Netvibes. I’ve been using it for the past month or two, and can conclusively say that I plan on keeping it for quite a while.

Features
Since I only use the site for a fairly specific purpose (feed reader/organizer/aggregator), I can only really comment on the features that I use.

User Interface

The UI of Netvibes is quite polished, making it very simple to organize and figure out how to use it. The first thing that most people will notice is that everything is drag and drop, making organization a breeze. The setup process for me took about an hour or so to get all of my feeds loaded and organized to my liking. For most sites, loading a feed is as simple as clicking on the in Firefox to find the URL to the feed, and then in Netvibes clicking “Add Content -> Add a Feed” and then pasting in the RSS URL. From there, Netvibes will load the feed, and give you an icon to represent the feed, which you can then drag onto any of your pages.

When adding multiple feeds initially, it’s easiest if you have two screens to spread multiple copies of Firefox over keep tabs with all of your feeds open and then just copy the URLs from the tab into Netvibes. To start I just created one tab that I added most of my feeds to without bothering to organize them, just to get them all added in, and after doing that, I then organized them into categories. I’ve got one tab for News Feeds (and News-like feeds, for such things as Engadget and Lifehacker), a tab for the more blog-like Blogs I read, a tab for all the Webcomics I read, and a generalized tab for things like the Weather, Calendar and To-Do list.

In addition to allowing you to drag and drop to organize your feeds, the other major UI is the Feed Reader itself, which is the most important aspect for most people using this as a feed reader/aggregator.

Feed Reader

The basic layout of the reader is very familiar to anyone who reads emails. There are two panels, with the one on the left showing your list of feeds, and the one on the right showing the content. Unread items in your feed are bolded on the left, with a count at the top of the total number of unread items. (Clicking on this total count anywhere you see it will mark all items it’s counting as read, reducing the count to zero - this is also seen on the feed pages, as well as a total for a specific page on its tab at the top.)

You have two options when viewing a feed - you can view the content of the feed itself, or you can view the site that the feed links to in the panel of the feed reader. For feeds that do not contain the full text of what you’re reading, this is necessary so that you can actually access everything. For traditional blogs, this also allows you to access the comment form when you wish to contribute to the conversation. However, viewing just the contents of the feeds significantly decreases load times, because you don’t have to load any images or media unrelated to the specific post you’re viewing (including ads). For most things that have a full text feed, I usually read them in feed view for this purpose.

Aggregation

To my less geeky friends, aggregation in the digital world refers to condensing information from many different sources into one location. Trillian is Instant Messenger aggregation. Wikipedia could be considered “knowledge aggregation”. Facebook and Myspace could theoretically be considered “Friendship aggregation”. Netvibes is internet aggregation. The bulk of what I use it for is technically just RSS aggregation, but the functionality is there to allow you to consolidate more than just your feeds. Features such as Facebook and Myspace widgets allow you to check your status on those sites, the weather plugin allows you to check on that, there are email widgets for most webmail providers and more. Additionally, almost any site that you would likely check for updates probably has an RSS feed that can be added as well.

All of these things assist aggregation, which allows Netvibes to become a starting point for your web activity.*

Issues
Unlike myself, Like practically everything ever, Netvibes has a few flaws. The sum of these have not been enough to prevent me from using the site daily, so if I seem especially harsh, keep that in mind.

Aggregation

I know what you’re likely saying to yourself. “But Nick! Just above, you listed that as a benefit. How can it be an issue, too?” The issue is, while it has many aggregation features, some of the very ones listed above are fairly weak to me. Both the Facebook and Myspace widgets were a bit lacking in what I would want, and both constantly had bugs where they were claiming there were unread items even when there were none. This may very well have been a bug on either Myspace or Facebook’s side, but the experience was still on Netvibes. The experience was annoying enough that I ended up simply disabling those widgets and gave up on using Netvibes for social media aggregation.

Feed Reader

Starting to notice a pattern? I just left all of the bad stuff out above so that I had more left over for down here. I’m sneaky like that.

My gripe with the reader is less an issue with the site than it is with RSS creators. I understand that many blogs and websites make money through advertising, and having a full-text RSS feed circumvents a number of the pageviews that increase your revenue. That having been said, surely your advertisers realize that if someone is reading an article from an RSS feed, they’re not going to be clicking on an advertiser’s banner anyways. And if you want to continue to make money from your RSS readers as well, then use a feed generator that inserts advertisements into the feed items themselves. I don’t mind seeing a few ads (though I’m just as unlikely to click on them in my feeds as I am when browsing your site) as long as they’re not large, annoying, or flash. However, by forcing me to load the whole site, you make it harder for me to read the article (websites aren’t meant to fit into a panel inside of a screen) as well as making everything slower for me as well. If it were possible for Netvibes to take an RSS feed and get the full text article from it, and display that inherently, that would be ideal.

For webcomics, as well, it would be best for these to have the comic itself within the feed. Many major comics do this - why can’t the rest of you?

User Interface

The last main issue that I tend to have, which I think legitimately is the fault of Netvibes, is located in the UI. For the most part, I really like the UI. The main issue I have is that occasionally my feeds will “un-read” themselves. By that, I mean that occasionally a feed which I’ve read all the items in and has not had anything new added will occasionally pop up that one or two random items are unread, or more rarely, the entire feed will un-read itself. I’ve noticed this tends to happen with a few specific feeds more than others, so it might not entirely be the fault of this site, but it seems like something that should be looked into and something that could and should be fixed.

Conclusions
Okay, so my conclusion was already stated in the beginning. I’ve managed to keep myself better informed of the news (or at least the news that I’m interested in) because of this site, as well as keeping myself up to date with many more blogs than I previously could have feasibly done. I’ve also reduced the amount of time wasted in reading my webcomics every day by being able to only load the ones that have been updated. There are extra social media aspects to Netvibes that I can’t really discuss, because I don’t know anyone else who uses it yet to get into the social aspect of it, so that may be fodder for another post on another day.

*This sentence was written by the Committee for Blogging Excellence, consisting of myself and Heather.

When the Supreme Court bases part of their logic around protecting a fictional character on a Fox TV show in handling the case law of completely reversing our country’s stand on torture, you know something is wrong.