Crenk

By: Luis Sandoval

Personalized homepage apps are amazingly abundant and all are easily customizable and easy to use. It’s an amazing concept, being able to have access to information, news, photos, and your daily to-do list from practically anywhere in the world.

Netvibes is one of these applications that allows you to set up your homepage to your liking. Those familiar with Google’s iGoogle will recognize Netvibes for what it is. Though I do find Netvibes to be aesthetically more appealing with it’s rich dark tones, and the text stands out from the background making it easier to read.

So let’s look under the hood and see what Netvibes really provides:

Interface Design: Sleek and visually appealing. Everything I need to set up my personalized homepage is easily identifiable and laid out where I would expect the options to be. The surface for your widgets is substantial and even they have their own colorful flair to distinguish them from their brethren.  What I especially like is the middle bar for settings does not take you to a new page, but instead slides out a menu where you can make adjustments on the fly without ever leaving your page. This is something that iGoogle lacks. You can delete widgets in iGoogle, but if you want to play with settings you typically have to leave the page to set them.

Widget Options: Definitely not a problem in this department either. The windows for the widgets are sizable, crystal clear, and very colorful. I honestly found more useful widgets for Netvibes then I did on iGoogle, but that could just be a matter of preference. Everyone’s tastes are different, so perhaps for you, the widgets you want are not available. Still, I went through most of the entire catalog and cannot imagine how someone would not find what they are looking for. The widgets move about the interface with just a drag and drop ability. As you move them the rest of the widgets move and adjust accordingly, again, similar to iGoogle’s design.

Social Aspect: This is where Netvibes sets itself apart. With the online community congregating around social networks, Netvibes stands heads taller above the rest by integrating several popular social networking sites into it’s search engine to find other friends that use their service. This creates a community where you can share directly with others, and even include your friend’s front page on your page. The idea was pretty amazing, and the concept very original. Unlike other spaces where you have to pick and choose what you want to share, and then have to go through permissions drama, Netvibes makes sharing easy and even fun.

Regarding the social aspect, the “Universe” ideas is simply awesome! Now the pages you put together can be published through Netvibes and pushed out into the internet community for others to view and interact with as well. Your pages might give you some popularity among certain circles and now your friend count through Netvibes will naturally increase. A very interesting way to meet someone, via their Netvibes page.

Overall Netvibes is definitely a recommendation for those that look to increase their social activity online, meet new people to share new things with, and be a part of something bigger than their normal online experience. If you prefer just straight up information with no community because of lack of time or interest, stick with sites like iGoogle, their app is just as easy to use and provides a more simplified experience.

After yesterdays big announcements at MacWorld, Crenk can now be added to your iPhone or iPod Touch Home Page.

If you head to crenk.com in your Safari browser and then bookmark the site, a few options will appear and one is to add Crenk to you Home Page. This will bring up a confirmation page and then it will be amazingly added to your Home Page, with a nice little icon that looks like this:

Myspace seems to be finally improving their user interface. Today they released a new beta home page which can be selected after sign-in. For so long myspace was just winning the race in social networking by sheer number of users and customizability options. However, since Facebook has opened up, there seems to be much more of a struggle and Myspace need to pull their finger out and get the site looking professional.

There are still a lot of issues on myspace that annoy me, for example music launching on a profile once it is opened and some profiles are just so high in flash and other objects it just shuts down my browser. With these new interface and nav options it seems to be looking a lot more professional and even has little web 2.0 looking buttons.

Options now include module selection and customizable colour combination. The new profile editor is only available for Internet Explorer users. Well I suppose one step at a time!