It’s not for nothing that I’m always as happy as a pup when I see that Google Reader is ready to serve me a new item from the Netvibes Blog. Because Most of the time, it’s an announcement about their service that just shows they really do work overtime to make it as perfect for people as possible.
Well, today was no different. In their latest blog posting, they announced even more ways of personalization options for their wildly popular starting page. Here’s what’s new:
Themes - While they already have a bunch of themes, it’s always nice to add even more options. Their new themes are quite colourful and add new looks to tabs. All have rounded corners of course ;). In addition to that, you can create your own custom theme, utilizing their other new feature:
Wallpapers - While they call this new feature wallpapers, it’s really more than that. You can add images to the top and bottom part of the portal, but you can always just change the colours of these areas, including text colours. As for the images, Netvibes provides a few stock images, but you can also add images from Flickr, MySpace, Twitter or even direct URLs.
As always, these changes are implemented quite elegantly and intuitively, demonstrating once again that while Netvibes may not have the cash of the big contenders (iGoogle or MyYahoo!), they sure do lead the pack when it comes to innovation and implementation. So basically, they do everything the others do, only better.
Yesterday I got an invite for a service called Freebase. Here’s what they are about (from their FAQ):
Freebase.com is home to a global knowledge base: a structured, searchable, writeable and editable database built by a community of contributors, and open to everyone. It could be described as a data commons. Freebase.com is enabled by the technology of Metaweb, which is described at www.metaweb.com.
I signed up for their waiting list after reading a rather enthusiastic review at TechCrunch. Here’s also a review by Tim O’Reilly.
After some time playing with it, I’m quite impressed. While the service is mainly geared toward developers, it’s actually quite fun spending some time tweaking entries and adding new ones. They are still invite only, and some entries reflect that (many entries still rely solely on the content added by their crawler from sites licensed under the Creative Commons license), but I do have a feeling they could find a pretty dedicated community once they open up.
The two biggest players in the social music world, Last.FM and Pandora, have been fighting for the love of music lovers worldwide for about two years. While both approaches to the same issue, listening to music online based on the music you already like, were always implemented differently (Pandora via the Music Genome Project, Last.FM via user’s recommendations and data pooling), the basic concept was the same: help people discover new music online and give them the ability to listen to it online.
In my eyes, Last.FM had always been the better service, not least due to their extensive efforts in embracing the whole of the music lover’s world in one big social network (”neighbours” based on taste in music, recommendations - both automatic and manual, discussion groups, event calendar, etc.). Pandora on the other hand really did do a good job when it came to quickly creating so-called “stations” with music you liked, mainly because there was no need to upload information about the music you listen to on your computer beforehand.
Well, the rivalry has now come to an end. Why? Because Pandora is forced to shut out everyone of the listeners who don’t reside in the US. While this was actually part of their TOS when they started, it was enforced only by having to sign up with a valid US ZIP code. But today they announced that due to license complications with all the countries other than the US, filtering out users from outside the US based on their IP will be enforced. They sent out emails to users about the crackdown today (TechCrunch article here), and I actually do believe their sentiment that they are indeed very sorry. Not only because they will deprive their users of the joy that is their excellent implementation of the Music Genome Project, but also because they have just been hit by one of the tentacles of old economy lashing out at their younger and hipper offspring, the new one (you know, economy), effectively destroying their service.
Last.FM, which seems to somehow be able to provide their service without getting entangled in all the license restrictions (or maybe they just don’t care yet), will be the victor emerging from this dirty, dirty episode besmearing the history of the global revolution the social web was actually set out to be (and I need some surgery to remove that sick part of my brain that comes up with these analogies).
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