The almighty FSM has finally answered my prayers and sent an invite for Netvibes‘ new iteration, “Ginger”, my way. You could of course argue that it was a member of Netvibes who sent this invitation my way, and that it was less my praying to the FSM and more my incessant begging all over the goddamn web. But that’s a technicality I’m not going to indulge in any further here. Lets move on to what Netvibes has created with Ginger:

First and foremost, you can now add a public page for yourself, humbly called “universe”.It’s a nice way of showcasing all your feeds and what else you’ve got going with that myriad of other services you’re probably using. Plenty of widgets like the Twitter or Skype ones will facilitate that. Well, here’s mine. When you’re having a look at it, don’t forget to note my last.fm widget, for it displays the groovy taste in music I undoubtedly have.

Another new feature, but not yet active, is a 2GB online space, letting you store mp3s, documents and whatnot. Like I said, not yet active, but showcased on the Netvibes blog here.

And since it’s web2.0 and nobody wants to do stuff alone anymore, Netvibes also enriched their service by adding contacts. Find out who’s on Netvibes and add them as contacts by importing from your address book or other services like Twitter and Flickr (I can’t wait for Open Social to make all that redundant). Save items from feeds and show them to your friends. Like so:

Whatever your friends or contacts are sharing you can view by clicking the “Activities” tab on the top bar of Ginger:

As I’m hugely unpopular and haven’t yet had time to trick and bully people into becoming my Netvibes “friends”, there’s nothing in that list yet. But I’m sure it will look quite awesome once there’s stuff in there.

That’s it for now.There’s a slew of other little changes, which you’ll be able to notice yourself either mid-February when Ginger will launch for everyone or sometime before that if you were able to shamelessly beg yourself into Ginger the way I did.