It’s been a longtime since I’ve used any news aggregator (I used to have one of my own back in 2000/2001) and I haven’t seriously thought about sticking with any. Until I saw NetVibes. This is what I like:
- Clean. A lot of the news aggregators seem determined to pack as much information as possible.
- Fast. It just feels fast, just like an AJAX application should.
- Complete. It has a nice selection of widgets including weather, mail, search, calendar access, useful integrated feed reader.
I’ve seen only one bug so far (low for a beta), but a fairly annoying one - feed URLs get reset sometimes when moving boxes around.
Tags: web-20
May 4th, 2006
Dharmesh Shah at OnStartups.com disagrees with 37Signals (part 1, part 2) on the push for fewer features and fewer options. Be sure you read the comments.
The most interesting point is about non-overlapping feature sets that many people forget about:
Many can (and have) argued that nobody uses more than 20% of the features in Word. That’s likely true. The issue is that it is a different set of features for each user, and within that set, one or more features are very important.
However I think the need for customizability is overrated and 37signals take a right approach. Essentially it is a question of diminishing marginal returns: some people will undoubtedly benefit from additional options(large monitor example), but most people will benefit from the time invested in other aspects of the system.
Tags: web-20
May 4th, 2006
37signals Preaches “Less” For Success at Frank Gruber’s blog relays the key theme from 37signals’s talk at DePaul University - Less is more:
- Do it with less people and less time. Comment: I work in consulting and I’ve seen what teams of 3-4 smart people can accomplish in 3 months that teams of 50 wouldn’t dream of finishing in five years.
- Ship with less features and abstractions. Comment: This will work when feature grids disappear and reviews will start rating simplicity higher than feature list.
- Use less money, use your own money (harder to spend). Comment: Great advice, but it assumes (mostly correctly) more money = more spending. However sometimes more capital is a good thing.
Tags: web-20
May 4th, 2006
Via Logic+Emotion, a pointer to categoriz, a link to a huge set of web 2.0 sites.
Tags: web-20
May 4th, 2006
