Everyone here at Apollo Media is infatuated with Netvibes, the personalized start page service that allows you to organize your favorite blog RSS feeds, Digg stories, Flickr pictures and more into easily manageable tabs. We previously hailed Netvibes as one of our top blog resources, and we were excited to hear about Netvibes Ginger, the newest version of the RSS aggregator.

Simply put, Ginger takes the same features that made Netvibes so accessible and adds more customizable and personal options, so you can integrate your various email and social networking services into one place. For internet addicts like us, these are incredibly valuable additions that save you the time and effort that would otherwise be spent hopping across all those pages separately.

Here is a breakdown of what Ginger is introducing to the social media world:

Feed your Mind

Netvibes offers the greatest freedom for customization, with no advertising or banners to take a way from the experience. Netvibes isn’t a Facebook or Myspace killer, but works to integrate all these social media services into one place. It saves you time and brings you all your personal updates instantaneously. You can also organize your media sources together on your start page, arranging RSS feeds and commercial widgets from popular news sites and media networks like Google News, The New York Times and CBS.

Adding feeds has become more intuitive, with a convenient search tool that lets you browse the web for your content. Simply going to the Add Content button at the top left of the tool bar opens up a module that lets you search for feeds by terms, browse through categories, or select some essential featured feeds from mainstream sources (like major news networks for example). There is also a web search feed that is automatically set in the center of the startup page, displaying Google search results within the same window.

Profile Options

While seasoned Netvibes users are already familiar with getting their feeds all in one place, Ginger expands on this feature by placing them within a convenient timeline and history window that you can make either private or public, so you can easily track what you (and your friends) have been coming across.

Like Facebook, you can edit your profile from the top tool bar and change your current status, profile picture and write other comments. The Activities button at the very top left allows you to save articles and pages from your feeds into an accessible list that you can mark as private or public. In the same window, you can also monitor the most recent activity of your friends. Saving links to these lists is incredibly simple, as you just have to highlight a story in one of your tabs and a small star will appear next to the headline. Clicking on that star gives you the option of saving that link to your activities module while also giving you space to leave comments and descriptions. This process is incredibly easily and allows you to share your most recent discoveries openly with friends in your Netvibes network.

Widgets Galore

Netvibes Ginger gives you access to hundreds of widgets including clocks, weather reports, games, Ebay trackers and web notes that can be added by going under the add content button and searching or browsing through widget selections. What’s also great about these widgets is that they are cross-compatible with other widgets from MAC OSX, Yahoo, Facebook, iPhone and many other platforms. You can sync your widgets together with the ones on your desktop or phone and customize their appearance, ultimately making them available for others to see.

The Social Aspect: A Universe at your Fingertips

Perhaps the most notable addition that Ginger introduces is the concept of the NetVibes self-published Universe, which basically allows you to publish your entire start page, with all its updates and feeds, for the whole web to see. Previously, only commercial sites and celebrities had this option, but now the average Netvibes user can have their turn. All your latest Flickr, Facebook and Myspace activity is all synced for display. Essentially, a Netvibes Universe is like having a blog that is easily customizable and automatically updated through the various feeds and accounts that you have made public. The attractive interface and ease of adding material is sure to create a boom in the creation of personal pages, especially for those obsessed with social networking but not wanting to go through the often lengthy process of creating one’s own personal blog or website.

The Verdict

So in conclusion, Netvibes Ginger retains all of the services’ original features and optimizes them for social networking and personal management. The new layout and design is also very inviting, with an added emphasis on pictorial and video displays and better categorization for the most popular feeds. The new Digg feed for example, allows you to sort through the most popular articles, dividing them into separate tabs (News, Science, Images, etc).

While the Universe creation system has yet to be fully available to the public, the concept of displaying your start page as its own website (at a netvibes.com domain) is especially intriguing, as it brings all your social media activities into one convenient place, allowing friends, peers, clients, customers, what have you, to keep track of your interests and activities without the trouble of sifting through all the separate accounts you hold.

Be sure to keep coming to Apollo Media’s Blog as we continue to work with Ginger and evaluate all the great additions and tools that will soon be at your disposal. So what are you waiting for? Head on over to Netvibes and tell us what you think!