I visited the Netvibes‘ office a few weeks ago to interview the CEO Freddy Mini. As usual, when there is something I like in the interview, but I know it is not going to make through the editing, I quickly render it and post it on HyveUp.
In this part of the interview, I asked Freddy Mini if Netvibes could offer a similar service that PageOnce offers. This question came to my mind simply because the two companies have a product that looks very similar (a page with a bunch of widgets basically), even though the service they offer is completely different.
I find his answer extremely interesting, and very related to where Netvibes is probably heading towards: Becoming a trusted provider of distributed content for organizations and individuals alike.
Netvibes is creating this trust by building an extremely transparent and open-source content distribution technology. Instead of pushing individuals to share their personal information with Netvibes on their site, the company opens up its platform for organizations to adopt their technology and make individuals’ personal information available through their widget solutions. The whole thing is still very conceptual I think, and maybe this is not the direction that Netvibes is heading towards. But it makes an awful lot of sense to me.