If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. If you have any questions, please see my policies page or if you would like to contact me, you can do so here. You can find out more about me here. I sincerely thank you for visiting!

Netvibes, the French company that is trying to be your home page, launched a new service this week called “Universe“. Basically, the Universe pages currently consist of home pages branded by various companies including eMusic, TechCrunch, and Time Warner. You can add the Universe pages to your own home page, but I’m not sure what that means quite yet. Netvibes plans to roll the service out to everyone soon which will allow anyone to create a branded homepage, complete with customizable CSS.

This appears to be an invasion of the MySpace/Facebook crowd where people can add their favorite websites to a branded webpage. It won’t be as flexible as those sites as I don’t believe you can put profiles, and any earthly thing that you imagine, on an ugly page with flashing fonts and backgrounds that make it impossible to read the text. Oh, and embedded music. Can’t forget the embedded music.

I’ve begun using Netvibes as a replacement for the Google Homepage. It’s a nice service to include a few items on my homepage, but it’s definitely not a replacement for a feed reader. It will probably be a lot like what happened with Google Reader where I tried all sorts of replacements before Google did a massive upgrade to the service and it became a clear “best of class”. But for now, I like Netvibes a lot more than YourMinis or simply using something like del.icio.us as a general homepage even though I do use it to bookmark pages.