Om Malik has posted an overview of some of the most
prominent personal home page services, focusing on
Netvibes. Apparently the
company just got a million dollars in funding from the founders of
FON and
Ning. A few thoughts:
These RSS feed displaying pages seem low
on the functionality and high on adopt ability to me. It's basically the same thing as
MyYahoo, isn't it? More functionality than MyYahoo, perhaps, and NetVibes released
an API earlier this month - so perhaps greater differentiation is just around the corner. I know I have no
interest in reading feeds in headline only format and without folders. But this is how a large number of new
users are getting into reading RSS feeds. MyYahoo was the first RSS reader I used - for about an hour.
There's no mention of the funding on the
company's development blog.
NetVibes has been around for a while, though, and is quite popular. If it's funding is now coming from other
start ups, themselves VC funded, does this speak to
Nicholas Carr's supply/demand funding bubble
argument? Carr argues that the Web 2.0 scene isn't a bubble right now because there's not an excess of VC
funds looking for projects to fund and thus funding lots of stupid ones. That someone large hasn't thrown lots of
money at NetVibes before now seems to me to support Carr's analysis.
This is a couple of days old, so maybe it's only
news to me - but Jimmy Wales' private wiki initiative has
received $4 million in venture capital from a very hip crowd of investors. Many people love the MediaWiki
system that Wikipedia runs on. I think others find it too complicated. 
