I’m a Netvibes junkie. I have over 10 tabs with 4 columns each, over 200 feeds in total and over 20 different modules on top. I don’t think it’s overkill. The whole idea of Netvibes is to put everything you need on a single customizable page, so that you can access all of it from anywhere. However, I didn’t just throw in every module that appeared on the huge Netvibes Ecosystem, otherwise I’d have hundreds of them by now. I’ve eliminated all that I didn’t use in a period of a week or two. These are the 13 Netvibes modules that I use regularly and can’t imagine my (Netvibes) life without them.

n interesting tidbit came out of the recent Foo Camp New Zealand (which unfortunately I wasn't able to attend). Robert O’Callahan from Mozilla, who is based in NZ but drives the rendering engine of Mozilla/FireFox, spoke about how Firefox 3 will deliver support for offline applications. This is significant because you'll be able to use your web apps - like Gmail, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Google Calendar, etc - in the browser even when offline. I deliberately mentioned all Google web apps there, because of course this plays right into Google's hands.

Startups have been multiplying like rabbits over the past three years. Due to the added competition, many startups are beginning to narrow their focus to a much smaller demographic. The year 2007 will mark the transition from startups aiming for the mainstream markets to specialists intensely focused on gaining smaller grounds. This is a different landscape, one that demands new rules of the game. It is the entrepreneur's job to anticipate these changes in order to align them with their startup's future.

The two elephants of personal computing these days are Microsoft and Google. Microsoft rose to dominance by capturing the desktop. Google is rising to dominance by capturing the web. Both strategies revolve around who can capture your data. Elephants require massive amounts of food to survive, so it's no surprise that Microsoft and Google are eyeing each other's data. Microsoft has started a 'Live' initiative to engage Google on the web. Google has tinkered with productivity apps that might just work offline, to join Microsoft on the desktop. If either Microsoft or Google is successful at grabbing the other's data, the most useful byproduct of their efforts will be new ways to easily move data between the desktop and web. The result of this battle will further blur the lines between purely desktop and exclusively web applications.

Google just launched a customized search service called Google Co-op (screen shots below). Co-op allows a user to create and launch a search engine with just a few specific websites included. Searches will return results from only that website.

Quoted: The #1 Resource on customizing Google Talk!