Newsfeeds

Until now, iPad users were automatically redirected to the mobile version of Netvibes — which works great on any mobile device.  But we wanted to go a step further to offer a version specifically designed for the iPad, optimized with a smooth touch experience and even more features. 

Grab your iPad, log on to www.netvibes.com and see for yourself.  We made a lot of code & cosmetic improvements to allow our iPad users to enjoy the full power of our dashboards:

Drag & drop apps or tabs easily with the touch of your finger

Personalize your dashboard design and layouts, just like on your computer

Now you can enjoy the full Netvibes experience, right from your iPad, including the Widget view that our desktop users love so much.  See all your apps, move them around, simply create the perfect dashboard for you, with the tip of your fingers.  Or stick to the Reader view if your prefer to display your newsfeeds.  You now have the choice! 

This is just the tip of the iceberg.  We are embarking on a journey to bring a unified user experience across all devices and all screen sizes — with native-like UI features.  Imagine being able to access your Netvibes apps and dashboard anytime, from any device, seamlessly.  Perfectly in sync.  Perfectly designed. 

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Ever wish you could save time and automate reports to your team or clients?  Want to quickly export social analytics from Netvibes Premium to your spreadsheet or presentation?  Now it’s easy with our new visual reporting and exporting features for Netvibes Premium. 

Now you can get automated, custom designed reports sent to your team, clients or yourself – including your latest social analytics charts. 

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To all our users, thank you for your quick feedback about our new idle mode.  I wanted to take a brief moment to discuss a little bit about why we created this feature, a workaround for those that don’t want it, and what our commitment is to you and all our users. 

The real-time Web is a balancing act.  Everyone remembers Twitter’s early days with frequent service interruptions.  Speed often comes at an expense, obviously, in server costs, but also in terms of reliability.  In the not too distant past, traditional websites only had to serve one page per pageview.  Today, real-time Web services and live updates can mean continually serving hundreds or thousands of updates for each pageview. 

Our challenge:What makes Netvibes so great is that we ping all your feeds and services for updates minute by minute, so you can see a live river of content.  We aggregate multiple real-time Web services, from Twitter to Facebook, and more than 1,000,000 different newsfeeds – all constantly updated automatically for our users.  This represents about 10,000,000 new items to collect, every day. 

Our solution: idle mode.  We wanted to create a solution that would be transparent (so our users are aware) and invisible (so as not to cause annoyance).  In our first iteration last week, idle mode would kick in after 20 min of inactivity and required users to click to reconnect.  Thanks to your feedback, we quickly realized that this was interrupting the user experience – we heard ya! 

Our dev team immediately worked around the clock to make it more unobtrusive.  Now users can restore their session simply by moving their mouse.  Moreover, we continue to count and update your feeds in the background–you can still see the number of new articles climb, even when in idle mode. 

This is a critical issue of fairness for all users.  Without idle mode, our inactive or “away” users would inadvertently slow down the network for active users.  We feel this is the best and fairest solution for maintaining speed and reliability all our users. 

Why did Netvibes implement idle mode? 

Speed.  Less load means greater speed and reliability for users that are active.  By implementing idle mode for users that are inactive for 20 min or more, we can save nearly 2/3 of our server load – which means more resources are liberated for our active users. 

Economics.  We are committed to keeping Netvibes.com free and ad free.  We do this in by generating revenue from our business Dashboard Intelligence products.  And we do this by being efficient with our bandwidth and distributing it fairly to active users who need it most. 

Workaround? 
We realize that there is an elite population of Netvibes users who need idle mode turned off.  This includes professionals and organizations who want to monitor feeds all day on dedicated second monitors.  These types of users would benefit from the Netvibes VIP service.  Netvibes VIP members can disable idle mode and they also benefit from personalized project support and guaranteed service agreements – for only €29,90/year, which is just $0.10/day. 

Let’s be perfectly clear: This is by no means an attempt to brick our service and force users to become Netvibes VIPs (especially at 10 cents a day!).  This is an issue of fairness, speed, sustainability and economics to continue to provide our free users with an ad free service and to empower professional users who want customized support to get what they need.  By so doing, we hope to meet the needs of all our different types of users. 

Again, thank you for all your patience, understanding and honest feedback.