P E S A K

There has been some confusion lately about the migration process to get access to Ginger. Some of you did receive their invitation code very quickly but had to wait several hours to be actually migrated.

We are really sorry about this but since a lot of you asked to be migrated we had to set up a queue in order to not overload the databases and the servers. At the moment the queue is decreasing and you should receive your access to Ginger in less than 24 hours.

Thank you again for your huge support and continue to have fun with Ginger

Here it is, netvibes Ginger is now open to any netvibes registered user.

To upgrade just follow the instructions.

Thanks to amazing feedback from Ginger 20,000 beta-testers we have improved Ginger and released cool new features.

Lots of new features and improvements

First any Ginger user can invite a friend to join him on Ginger, the invited user will be automatically friends with the person who invites him.

To try the new invite function, click on the picture below (on Ginger only)

Wall Widget

Requested by almost every beta tester, it is now available Post messages on your friends' Public Page on their Wall.

Archive a widget

This requested feature since the early days of netvibes is now available. Instead of deleting a widget, you can decide to archive it and store it in your personal Activities Timeline. The widget will be saved with its parameters and you will be able at any time to restore it. There is no limit to archiving, it's unlimited. Yes unlimited !

Share a widget

On your Public Activities Timeline you can now share a whole widget by starring it. The widget will appear in your Activities Timeline and any of your followers will be able to add it pre-configured by you in their own page.

New themes and wall papers to celebrate the launch of Ginger

As some may have noticed already we have brand new themes and wallpapers. It is just the beginning as we will improve all our theme and customization features very soon!

Ginger features and performance improvements

A lot of improvements have been made since our last blog post including:

• General startpage loading time improvements
• Prefetch feeds features
• Flash audio player improvements
• OPML import/export improvements (now available in adcontent/add a feed section)
• Mobile and iPhone versions improvements
• Feedreader content is not updated if marking all items of a tab as read
• New Ginger thumbnails
• "Send to my universe/Send to my private page" feature improvements
• New Premium Widget : Stechworld, L'express, Usa Today, FranceTelecom, Computer World UK
• Widgets Improvements: myspace, digg, FeedReader, Weather, multiple feeds widgets (Premium widgets), preconfig widgets

Thanks again for your support. Enjoy !

For the second year, netvibes has been selected as a finalist for Webware 100 by editors of Cnet and Webware in the Browsing Category. The 100 finalists have been picked among 5,000 eligible entries.

Vote for us now!

The Webware 100 Awards recognizes the best Web 2.0 sites, services, and applications that are leading the next wave of innovation. Voting will run until March 31. Winners will be announced on April 21, the day before the big Web 2.0 expo opens.

If you love Netvibes help us win this Award by voting for us.

Thanks and see you soon on Ginger with lots of new exciting features!

Thanks for all your feedback we have been able to dramatically improve ginger and also release some cool new stuff.

So what's new on ginger ?

Activities Widget

Just like the twitter and facebook widgets, you can check what your friends are up to with one handy widget. It also allows you to change your status to quickly answer your friends. To add it, simply drag'n'drop your avatar from your Profile to your page.

Search your activities stream

We are adding a new way to explore your activities with a search engine. Simply type a keyword and all the matching events will show up. It's now easy to find a link or a message again.

Find your facebook friends that are already on ginger

We added a cool way to find your facebook friends, but also look into your gmail, twitter, yahoo, ... Finding your friends on ginger should be an easy and fun experience

Ginger goes mobile

Launched last year, the mobile and iPhone versions are now ready for Ginger. All Netvibes Ginger users can now access their accounts from http://m.netvibes.com/ and read their feeds on the go.

lots of bug fixes

We also squashed a lot of bugs, for those who are interrested we have the list below.

What's next?

We have around 7000 netvibers trying ginger today, helping us improve the user experience, giving feedback and helping with the bugs. This update is not the last one. Before the release we will add new features, improve the service and make sure that using netvibes, your universe (your netvibes public page) will be fun and easy.

not yet on ginger?

We have 1,000 invites for the fastest readers of this blog: GINGER4U. Copy-paste this code and use it on ginger.netvibes.com.

We trust you'll enjoy the Ginger experience!

Bug fixes

Here is a list of the bugs that are now fixed:

• General
  • Settings were not saved
  • "Back to contacts" button issue on Safari
  • Flash audio player fix
  • Feed reader read/unread lost status fix
  • Feed reader right-click bug fix
  • Sign-in on Internet Explorer 7 improvements
  • Safari 2 authentication improvements
  • Feed reader "Right to Left" improvements
  • Loading behavior improvements

• Add content
  • "Add content" empty categories
  • "Add a feed" issues with Safari
  • OPML import/export fix

• Universes, Contacts and Activities
  • Universes are now available on Safari browser
  • Universes feed reader improvements
  • Activities ATOM/RSS output improvements
  • Friends/Followers back button improvements
  • "Send to my universe/Send to my private page" feature improvements
  • GMail friends import fix
  • AIM friends import fix
  • Activity feed special characters fix

• Widgets
  • Improvements: Weather, Web page, Web note, Todo list, iCalendar, Bookmarks, Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Hotmail, AOL Mail, Craigslist, Flickr, Picasa, Last.fm, Box.net, Youtube, Dailymotion, Flash, Web search, Map search
  • Premium widgets improvements
  • Widgets behavior on Opera browser improvements
  • Widgets missing feeds fix
  • Widget drag & drop featured fix

Enjoy and again thanks for everything

You probably noticed some errors today around 1PM GMT (5AM PST) due to heavy load. We thought that you would love our new Ginger features but we didn't expect such a success!

In order to prevent any additional load problems we'll take this opportunity to bring the site down at 5PM GMT (9AM PST) in order to upgrade the database servers. The expected downtime is about 4 hours which will give us the ability to fix this and prepare the next wave of upgrades and features.

We'll of course let you know as soon as everything is up again.

Update: Everything is back to normal. The servers came up again at midnight GMT (4PM PST). It took us then 30 minutes to digest the load of all the users refreshing their Netvibes every 20 seconds ;)

The official Ginger website is now open at ginger.netvibes.com. You will find more information about Ginger and if you have received an invitation for the private beta, you will be upgraded to ginger.

We have distributed thousands of invitations to bloggers and some will be distributed through twitter as well.

To the first 100 fastest reader of this blog, here is our first invitation code: NETVIBESFAN.

See you soon on Ginger, hope you'll like it!

Thanks to all our members who voted for us, this awards means a lots, not only because it was organized around Techcrunch, Gigaom , Venturebeat and ReadWriteWeb but because it was their readers who voted. More details about the crunchies here.

For netvibes, the next big challenge is the upgrade to ginger that introduce a lots of new social features and we enable you to keep track more easily of your social life, create your netvibes public page and share items with your friends. We are targeting full migration in mid february.

Enjoy netvibes, Enjoy Ginger, and thanks again for your support !

netvibes is nominated in two categories :
- Best design / User interface
- Best international start-up

If you would like to support netvibes, click on the badges here below, select "netvibes" and press "Vote". (you can vote everyday)

Thank you for your support !

The closed beta is going pretty well: the first beta testers are doing great creating their Universes and giving us incredible feedback. For those of you who don't have access to Ginger yet, we would like to share with you videos of the upcoming features.

As described in previous blog post, you will see:

• how easy adding new widgets is, with the integration of Ecosystem
• that you can save links for yourself and your friends
• what your friends are doing with "Activities"
• how to browse your friends Universes

Watch "Netvibes Ginger: Add content" in HD on Vimeo or with Quicktime

Watch "Netvibes Ginger: Activities" in HD on Vimeo or with Quicktime

Watch "Netvibes Ginger: Friends and Universes" in HD on Vimeo or with Quicktime

As we start upgrading some testers to the new Ginger version, we wanted to give you more details about the new netvibes :

Add more than 150 Premium Widgets

With Premium Widgets, save additional space for your screen by merging feeds from one website in one handy widget. Forget about RSS, every time a new RSS feed is available, it will automatically appear on the widget.

Listen to webradios

In addition to the podcast, the Netvibes player can now stream your favorite web radios.

2GB of free storage space for every registred user

Connect your favorite widgets with the drive and access and share all your documents via your Personalized Page.

Save interesting blog posts, pictures, videos and more for yourself and let your friends know.

All your starred items will be visible in your activities timeline. Make them public and let all your friends know what the latest cool stuff you've done.

The private beta testing has started today and we will add more users every day until the official in January. We wanted to make sure that we provided you with the coolest experience on the Web.

During LeWeb3 conference in Paris, we have gathered cards filled in by participants with the name they wanted for their universes (ex: http://www.netvibes.com/francois). Those lucky ones will soon receive an invite on Ginger and be among the first to try it out. If you are very convincing and want to help us with the debugging processs let us know and we will see what we can do ;). Join the facebook group dedicated on netvibes Ginger and invite your friends, we will provide some invites there as well.

We will unveill more features in the coming days. Watch out for them on the blog !