Your Startpage, Your Way - Netvibes.com

Having a great startpage is important to me. If you take a look at my laptop, I have three Firefox browsers open, and about 10 tabs open under each one (that's 30 websites). You don't even want to know about all the other things I have open. I go to my startpage several times a day anytime I open a new browser or hit the handy dandy icon that looks like a house there at the top.

I just began using Netvibes.com and I'm pretty impressed so far.

It's a drag and drop website that you can practically setup any way you please. You can have a Google and Yahoo search box, RSS feeds containing various news sources and your favorite blogs, your Gmail or Yahoo mail account, price watch, an Flickr tags, your webpage bookmarks or del.icio.us bookmarks, local weather, and probably a ton of other stuff I haven't even used yet!

It's really pretty cool. I used to use my.yahoo.com, but this is so much simpler. Drag the boxes around to my liking, voila!

This is cutting edge Web 2.0, using Ajax. I've been a little unsure about Ajax myself, mostly because I've always been weary of things that don't work in all situations - Ajax doesn't work for those who happen to have Javascript turned off. This has definitely changed my mind a bit, though.

They seem to be working on a lot more features, such as being able to customize the look of it, adding background images and choosing a theme.

My only real complaint is that you can't share your netvibes area with other people. Sharing sites being so popular now, it seems to be such a huge oversight to me. Ah well, it's still my new favorite startpage.

Now I only have to have 20 browser windows open.