You’ve probably heard of Google’s personalized page before. But, released today is a new service called, Netvibes. Netvibes is a “custom made web 2.0 home page solution” that allows you to signup and make your own personalized page for free. I have been waiting for the release of Netvibes for a while now and just noticed that it was the release date! I used it in its alpha release and was very excited to see the actual release of it. So, here it is:

With Netvibes, you can very easily customize your page to include RSS/Atom Feeds, your Gmail emails, weather from your area, notes, and a neat web search tool that has Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Wikipedia. The developer is also working on many more features such as modules for bookmarks, flickr, todo lists, and also color themes. Also, you may import a OPML file to include all your feeds easily into Netvibes.

Adding content to Netvibes is very simple. You click on the “Add Content” link and a box on the left will appear. In the box, you will see areas for my feeds, featured feeds, feed directory, and the modules on the bottom. Simple click on any of the choices and a new box will appear on the right, like you see in the screenshot above. In my example, I click on Webnote. With Webnote, you simply click into the text field and type your notes. Then click, “Add to my page.” Done.

You also have the ability to adjust the items that are already on your page. You can drag and drop them wherever you choose and change the options for each block. For example, you can hover over a feed and notice the edit link will appear. Click it and you can then change the amount of results, the title, and the feeds address.

So far, you have seen that you can add blocks of content. Now, you will see that it actually has a built in feed reader. Yes, that’s right, a feed reader. See the screenshot above? That is my feed. I selected a post in my feed block and then this window comes up. On the left are the entries you can select from the feed, and on the right is the content of the entry. How amazing is that! You can even choose, “Read All” to show all the entries in the window for that feed at once to make it easier to read through. This is excellent and very easy to use. Great job with the feed features.

That about sums it up. Go give Netvibes a try and see how you like it! Also look out for the new features and updates from the Netvibes Blog. On the left colum, you can see what is on the todo list. Those features are looking great. I’ll be keeping a watch on those.

View Netvibes - Your personalized page.

Update: Bryan (Avalonstar) has pointed out to me that the service currently does not support Opera or Safari. Sorry! Maybe the developer is working on it. Lets hope so.

Update 2: I can’t believe I forgot about this feature. I was excited about it too! Podcast users, you are not left out! Netvibes has a built in Podcast player along with links in the feeds to listen and download the podcasts.

That should be it for the updates now :-) Enjoy!