Netvibes Planning Widgets

Posted on February 13, 2007

Business 2.0's The Next Net says Netvibes CEO Tariq Krim is "widget crazy." In an interview Krim told The Next Net that Netvibes plans to turn the Netvibes modules into widgets that can be posted on blogs.

Now he is about to blow it all apart. Within the next few weeks, all of those little boxes (Krim calls them "modules") will become exportable as widgets to other Websites as well. "I love destroying what I build," he says.
It's Krim's way of contributing to the budding widget economy. Netvibes has 10 million active users, If you figure that each one has created at least five modules per page, that's a lot of potential widgets. Krim declares:
"Widgets are killing the Webpage. It is time to go to something else. We are entering the widget economy. We are going there no matter what."
Netvibes is also developing a Universal Widget API that will let widgets talk to one another and synchronize among themselves. And in April, Krim plans to add social networking features to Netvibes, such as the ability to subscribe to your friends' widgets or send them a cool blog post or video directly to their Netvibes page.

Krim old Next Net that the widgets will be available on Netvibes in April. Mashable reports that Netvibes rival Webwag already has widgets.

The second piece of news almost fell under the radar. Netvibes rival Webwag has quietly enabled a feature that lets users post widgets from Netvibes and Google IG to a Webwag page. They want to keep it quiet until the feature is officially ready, but I love the idea. Once all the startpages support the same widgets, how do you choose between them?

Webwag's widgets don't sound anything like Netvibes exportable widgets that can be embedded on a blog. Once Netvibes has widgets competing startpages like Pageflakes will probably offer them as well.