Netvibes Ginger

It looks like Netvibes has opened Ginger to add its users. It seems the largest change is the movement towards a more social aspect of homepages. Yes, we all know about Facebook and some people I know are downright addicted. Since setting up my Facebook, I don't really go back unless someone I know adds me as a contact. I've written a brief "idiot's assessment" to the features I've noticed, in case you're wondering what it gets you.

• Personal Universes - You can design a customized public Netvibes page. I set one up to mess around with it, but I can't see ever really changing what's on here or looking at those of friends. This is probably useful if you're constantly finding new widgets and feeds that you want to share with friends you believe are accessing your universe. I guess you could also share random feeds with people by adding them and linking them here. I don't think there's much value add for me here.
• Social Content - This is probably where Ginger is going to win me over. By adding people as friends and adding the activities module to your personal page, you can see what people find interesting. Now when Jeff clicks the little star next to a news story (or anything) he finds interesting, it will show up on my private Netvibes homepage. It's kinda like a combination of Facebook's activity monitor and del.icio.us social bookmarking, only I don't have to go somewhere else to look at it. I think that's pretty neat. Add me as a friend and start sharing!
• Timelines - Time counters on content? Yes, please. Knowing how long ago blog posts or Slickdeal deals were posted is pretty handy.
• Netvibes Platform - I actually haven't tested this but I gotta think portability across platforms (iGoogle, Netvibes, etc) is a good thing.
  

One word of caution is that it adds a new toolbar of sorts to the top of your Netvibes. I'm all about maximizing content without scroll bars so I hide as much of the header and footer as possible. The best I can tell, there's no way to integrate this with the settings/help header and you can't get rid of it. The Netvibes Customize module will get rid of it but now doesn't hide the settings header. :-\

While I'm sure it took a shit-ton of coding, I don't think it's a monumental update. As I've said, it's probably a lot more valuable to those who are more "social" about their happenings. There are some clutch features that make it yet another step on the path of improving an already great product, though. Change is inevitable, at least with Netvibes it's always in the right direction.