Netvibes adds instant dashboards

If you're not familiar with Netvibes, it's a home or start page. That is to say, it's your own personal portal to the net, with links to your favourite sites, RSS feeds, search widgets, email checking software and a whole bunch of other things besides. One of the time consuming things with a system of this type is that it takes time to create pages or tabs and to populate them with appropriate content. Netvibes has however overcome this problem by introducing dashboards. They're accessible from the top left hand corner of the screen (familiar if you're already using the system) thus:

As you can see, I've already created two, one for the best football team in the world, and one for Web 2.0 They're simplicity to create - just click on the 'New' link, type in what interests you, and Netvibes almost instantly creates a dashboard. Simply click on the link and go to the newly created resource.

My Web 2.0 dashboard was populated with a general tab, news, video, conversation and Google search. The news tab had 6 different news related widgets, video content was pulled in from 3 different sources, and conversations took data from 6 resources. You can of course move the widgets around, delete them, add others and so on, just as you can with other Netvibes pages. The News page looks a bit like this:

It's a very clever idea, and one that I like a lot. Saves a huge amount of time and is instantly useful. Netvibes is now the clear out and out leader in the Home/start page business, and Pageflakes, with their rather sorry forced advertisements (some of which are close on NSFW, and certainly not appropriate in a school environment) is lagging so far behind that it's sad.