makingspace

netvibes

Tariq Krim was in San Francisco on assignment for the French business paper he worked for when it occurred to him he was in the wrong job: ‘I should stop talking about things and just do it. I would not be a journalist any more but a digital publisher.’

It was 1999, the early days of the online music boom and Krim started a French blog devoted to the emerging ‘MP3 generation’. Seven years on, he says, his main music blog attracts more readers than his old newspaper, La Tribune. He is a rare European success story on the global Web 2.0 scene.

Krim’s idea began as a tool built for his own use. He had 17 blogs and craved a way of monitoring them all in a single place. When he published the address of the mini-site he had created to do that, it turned out half the world craved something like it, too. ‘On the first day we had 15,000 users. ‘

One of the most striking things about Netvibes is its studied neutrality, both between the different sources it draws content from – a teenager’s blog from Des Moines looks the same as the latest New York Times story – and between the west coast digital giants. ‘Google wants to bring people into its own environment, the Googlesphere, and it’s going to be the same for Yahoo, the same for Microsoft. Our idea is that we don’t want to choose: our users like services from all three and others … The primary philosophy of the internet is the ability to open yourself to the whole world.’

What is Web 2.0?

For me, it’s the web as it should have been since the beginning. When Tim Berners-Lee created the web, he followed a ‘read-write’ approach and the ‘read’ approach won the first era of the web. Now the ‘write’ approach is gaining popularity.

What is your big idea?

To get everything in one page very easily.

What is the next big thing?

Web 3.0 will occur when our connection to the net will be permanent and the information available will give some kind of collective intelligence.

(information from The Guardian)

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