Just a short post to share a basic thought: my Twitter feed is progressively replacing my Netvibes. My Netvibes is getting really crowded, and I barely can manage to read half of the new feeds everyday. Finally, the purpose of Netvibes was to reduce time spent on keep track of information, but the problem is that due to this time saving, we tend to follow more sources of info. Hence the need to find again another “filter” for good information, and Twitter can definitely be used that way.
With a good selection of feeds, especially VCs’, entrepreneurs’ and bloggers’ ones, you can keep connected to what’s happening in a most entertaining way. It is particularly true since less and less blogs provide deep analyses, and become more and more a platform to share some great web discoveries and articles. Microblogging is definitely more appropriate than blooging for this prupose. In cas of blogs providing deeper analysis you don’t want to miss, or major newspapers, you just have to subscribe to their feed (almost all of them have one!): authors generally publish on Twitter a link to their last article.
But a missing feature on Twitter still limit this use (correct me if I’ve missed smthg): the possibily of creating different tab to follow friends updates and news separately. I’m sure it will come soon, if it’s not already the case!
I’m getting a little bit depressed when I see that some great innovations (netvibes) can be so rapidly jeopardized by new great innovations (twitter). It is hard enough to find something which hasn’t been done already, without being obliged to create something which cannot be replaced. Again, the added value is in execution and not in the idea itself, but it’s getting harder and harder to create strong entry barriers in the Net sector. Don’t you think?
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Hi Fidji,
You’re absolutely right. I’m not using Netvibes but iGoogle for the exact same purpose. I find myself getting more and more news from Twitter.
I look at my iGoogle page each day but things does not change that much and not every blog gets updated each day whereas on Twitter each time you get an update it’s something short but interesting.
As far as competition is concerned it’s the way the net evolves. I don’t know if Twitter will replace Netvibes or iGoogle pages but it’s definitely turning into a live news broadcast service, something the Twitter’s team never though about.
Hi Fred,
Thanks a lot for this really interesting comment, I’m glad to see that other people noticed the same thing.
Concerning innovation, I think that the Net, by empowering customers and communities, has fostered the creation of new uses of a specific service. It’s the online equivalent of the invention of the “Post-it”, lying on the question “what can we do with a glue that doesn’t stick?”, except that on the Net it’s the community which answers this kind question by directly using the product and appropriating it.
Hi Fijdi,
Interesting thought and I certainly find myself clicking a lot more on links that friends and people I follow in Titter are posting. That said, any tool is really only as good as how responsible one is with using it. And if Twitter becomes feed-reader 2 or 3.0, it will also need to make the management of feeds easier.
On Twitter surpassing Netvibes / iGoogle. I think, rather than seeing Titter as a reader, it instead becomes a rich, customised _feed_ of news and conversations, which can also be added as one of several news-items in Netvibes et al. What will perhaps help with the management of them is to subscribe to several twitter-feeds in netvibes, instead of in Twitter. Why re-invent the wheel?
Really interesting comment as always Vince.
You’re right about the notion of responsibility. I started to be fed up with Netvibes because I was unable to correctly select the better feeds and it ended up by being overcrowded. The same thing could happen with Twitter: with a wrong selection of feeds to follow, you can receive uninteresting news or spend too much time reading them.
But I just say that to keep track of basic tech news Twitter becomes a lot easier than Netvibes (especially since blogs provide a lor of duplicate content, much more than on Twitter I noticed).
And I definitely like your idea of different Twitter feeds in Netvibes!
@ fred : I didn’t remember the word for “finding something which was unexpected at the beginning” and it is called “serendipity”. You probably know it already but I love using exact words and I didn’t feel satisfied with my last comment without using the right word
You’re such a perfectionist
In fact, the presentation of updates makes me think it is exacly the same like news agencies (reuters, afp…), news we use in radio for instance. The only difference is that you can have your news lined up in different categories. So, I totally agree with the system of classification (but not only friends and news separately) while keeping a general view of news. Maybe, it would be simpler to make our choice among numerous and “strong” offered titles.
Thanks Bea for this comment, and I’m glad to see that you finally created your Twitter feed
Hi,
I think that twitter and netvibes (or igoogle) are complementary.
2 applications and 2 utilities : I can’t do the same thing with twitter and with netvibes.
With netvibes, i can directly read all my feeds on netvibes without going on the blog except when i want to comment the articles.
With netvibes i follow the people who i have some interests. They tell us what they are doing.
So the only link between netvibes and twitter is when someone is telling us that they are publishing an article.
About the tab on twitter, i changed my mind I think it would be interessant to make a difference between the friends I really know, the friends of friends and the people talking about interessant subjects. So tabs would be useful.
Thanks for this comment Maxence. I understand your opinion, but a lot of people in my feeds (and that’s how I chose them) do not simply say what they are doing on Twitter but also share great links (which is why Fred said that it is an unexpected but widespread use of Twitter). When I don’t want to loose time by reading deep analysis while staying tuned with what is happening in the world, my Twitter feed is definitely sufficient whereas my Netvibes takes too much time to read. Which is why I think that for some specific uses (when you don’t have a lot of time but want to catch up with some important news), Twitter can be a good tool even if it wasn’t the original use and purpose.