robwebb2k

There is an interesting article in last week’s Economist on Algerian native & French citizen Tariq Krim and his successful feed aggregator Netvibes. I am a huge fan of Netvibes and think that it works almost too well. I use it to scan the headlines of over 80 news sources and blogs throughout the day and while I am always up to speed on news, there is almost always something interesting to read that I haven’t seen yet from one of my sourced sites. It takes a bit of discipline to not scratch the itch and see what is going on all the time. I have pages devoted to tech news, tech blogs, VCs, entrepreneurs, traditional news, and one to random stuff. My favorite Netvibes feature is the way you add feeds – no messing with XML is required – just paste the site address into the add content window and the feed shows up in your page.

I am a bit surprised that I don’t see more people using aggregators, especially people like traders who have information intensive professions. The traders I know monitor sites that aggregate financial news in real time and are constantly watching CNBC, etc., but I don’t know any that use aggregators to track hot stories.

Anyways, the Economist article is worth checking out. It seems a little bizarre that Mr. Krim is a rising star in French politics because he has created a successful web application that generates very little revenue, but I guess you have to take what you can get. Also, Yahoo has always been rumored to be a potential purchaser of Netvibes, but with the recent release of Yahoo Pipes, this seems unlikely. From what I can tell, Google Reader is nearly as good as Netvibes, so they won’t be buying either. It is unclear where Netvibes will end up down the road. They probably need to start making some money soon though…

Edit: In case the folks at WebWorkerDaily are interested…my full bio is viewable via LinkedIn .