Now for a little real-time analysis. I don’t know what it is, but to the core of me I’m just not feeling Netvibes. I know it’s putting me up against a lot of praise, a total of $16 million in VC financing from at least two well known firms, but I’m just skeptical of the user numbers they’re claiming. Here’s a chart of the users they are claiming:
My sources: http://blog.netvibes.com/?2005/09, http://web2.sys-con.com/read/198123.htm, http://english.martinvarsavsky.net/general/netvibes.html, http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/archives/2006/06/netvibes-4-million.html, http://mashable.com/2006/08/14/netvibes-hits-5-million-users/
However, I looked at Alexa stats and it doesn’t show the same reach as two other sites, LiveJournal and Mixi.jp, which claim around 5 million users. Here’s the chart:
I guess the critical flaw here could be that Netvibes is an AJAX page, which, if Alexa heavily weights page views, under-reports Netvibes reach because users don’t generate new page requests. I suppose a decent double-check for this is to look at page-views compared with its competitors. In that case, Netvibes leads the pack when measured against goowy and pageflakes.
I know that Goowy is in the hundreds of thousands of users, so netvibes appears to be in line with it’s user numbers, generating 50 times as many views.
Regardless of this analysis though, something about Netvibes just makes me uneasy. It seems too much like a feed reader. But on the other hand, doing a better job than the Google and Yahoo! personalized pages could get them all that default traffic from when users fire up their browsers. However, the service seems easy to copy. They have a lot of essentially proprietary (programmed in their API) modules going for them, though, and Netvibes is definitely the slickest AJAX page on the block. They’ll definitely will win any battle over this category. I think these start services are only valuable to search pages because they get users into the search engine. Netvibes comes up short on this point since a lot of the activity on the site encourages users to navigate away. They have been correcting this though, by having content expand into windows. If Netvibes can really become a surfing hub instead of a start node, the service will really take off. I agree with Freddy Mini when he says there are two paths for netvibes: either through the stratosphere, or down the drain.
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