Netvibes, the extremely popular web service that allows users to have customizable news aggregation startpages, announced a new service at their Web 2.0 Expo afterparty in San Francisco. Netvibes Universe is the name of this new service and there will be two forms of it - personal and branded. Personal Universes provide users with two pages, one public and one private, that they can fully customize with their own content as you would expect. The public page can be passed along to your friends to read.
Soon, every single Netvibes user will be able to create a personal Netvibes Universe, that is, a Netvibes page that you can build using the content and widgets that you want -- and make it available to the world at large.
Netvibes users will soon have two pages for every account: a private page, where you subscribe to all the content for your personal, everyday use, and a public page, where you can allow others to access your favorite content -- everything that you love on the web.
However, I wanted to draw attention to the branded Netvibes Universe pages. Netvibes will be creating public pages for hundreds of "your favorite musicians and media outlets". While the "your favorite musicians" part gives me haunting images in my mind that Netvibes will go the way of MySpace, I am absolutely loving the fact that Universe pages will be created for large content publishers like Time, Forbes, etcetera. In a nutshell..
Get all the stories from CBS, CNN, Newsweek and many others on one page, which you can access anywhere for free.
Now, you will be able to break free from the sometimes overcrowded and hard to scan (#4) layouts and content on large websites you read everyday - without having to resort to subscribing to dozens of RSS feeds.