Netvibes!!

I went ahead to try out Netvibes and to be honest, I have never used such application before! I set up an account and I was pretty confused by the amount of information on the dashboard, I was trying to figure out the various features and explore the application. I tried to add a few news feed like from The Straits Time (Singapore newspaper) but I am getting some errors from the URLs. Otherwise, the standard template of the various news like Google and Bing news are working fine! I read a little bit about what Netvibes are commonly used for and based on the information on Wikipedia, below are some of its uses (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netvibes):

- Brand Monitoring – to track clients, customers and competitors across media sources all in one place, analyze live results with 3rd party reporting tools, and provide media monitoring dashboards for brand clients.
- E-Reputation Management – to visualize real-time conversations and social activity feeds, and track new trending topics.
- Product Marketing – to create interactive product microsites, with drag-and-drop publishing interface.
- Community Portals – to engage online communities
- Personalized Workspaces – to gather all essential company updates to support specific divisions (e.g. sales, marketing, HR) and localizations.

As an individual, we can customize the news feed according to our interest or needs. Like for example, if we are interested in Presidential Election 2016, we can go ahead and source out various different news agencies on the internet like CNN, New York Times, ABC news, Channel news asia and many other news agencies both local and overseas, can be included into the dashboard. The thing about news are that there are a lot different perspectives and perceptions on local or global issues across different news agencies. With the application, we can look across various news reports to have a better idea of what is actually going on around us. 

We can even connect our social media accounts like Twitter and Facebook to this application, and monitor them!

I thought it was pretty useful and it is like a one stop monitoring station for all my online applications or accounts! I can even post a status on my Facebook directly through Netvibes although it doesn't provide the full Facebook features like posting of videos or photos but are basic enough for some interactions with your friends. You can link your emails to it and it also offers a to-do list feature where you can put in the tasks that you are required to do. It is pretty cool and I have never thought that such application even exists haha! It definitely helps in saving time and there is no need to open up multiple browsers to do the various things like check Facebook, check email, check Twitter and check the news, all these can be done on Netvibes! Pretty cool huh! I might consider using this for long term since it is really useful but for social media wise, I would still prefer the original social media interface because of the limited features that are available on Netvibes.