Global Wandering

Netvibes is my favorite free web service. I've been using it for about a year as my web browser start page. It's brilliant because they keep making it better. Founded in Paris, the company launched its service only 15 months ago. It now has 10 million users in 60 different languages.

Netvibes allows you to pull data from all over the web and organize it on your desktop. You can pull in RSS feeds from newsites and blogs, pictures, email accounts, and other web services, such as Box.net, Flickr, delicio.us. and many others. Information can be organized on separate pages with tabs, using customized column widths and layouts.

I use Netvibes to track close to 100 blogs, newspapers, and other web sources, all of which sit nice and tidy on my desktop. The consolidation of all this data in one place is perfect for me, because deep down I'm a mess when it comes to organization. I despise paperwork, because it just piles and piles up, and then I lose things. So now I do everything I can to digitize and store things in cyberspace. As long as it is out there, then I don't have to worry about it cluttering up my office.