Recently I got in on the Netvibes Ginger beta and I really like what they’ve changed in the upcoming new release. For those that don’t use Netvibes or don’t know what Netvibes is, it is basically a website that you can set up your own dashboards with feeds and widgets much like the iGoogle or Windows Live home page.
What’s new in this release is the ability to create your own “universe” (public dashboards) for others to view. There’s also now a social network component to it now where you can share links with your friends and post those “status updates” that you already post on Facebook.
There’s also a lot of interface improvements over the previous Coriander release. There’s also now a search tool integrated to help you find new feeds; it doesn’t work that well though in terms of search relevancy. Perhaps when more users are in the system the search engine will have a bigger database to draw information on.
A small change to it that I really enjoy is the ability to specify which tab that Netvibes open up to. I have a “homepage” dashboard which contains the stuff I check most frequently, but now I don’t have to switch to a new tab when I load up the site again when the last tab I viewed was user design.
Bah, lets just jump into the screenshots. 
Set Up Wizard
Setting up the account was a breeze with the three step wizard
Picking my dashboard URL
Filling out my personal information
Activating my personal universe
