Even as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg reportedly considers a Microsoft (MSFT) investment, upstart entrepreneurs at the MIT Emerging Technology conference ponder what comes next. Digg.com founder Kevin Rose made an obvious point yesterday. “I was talking to Mark,” said Rose, who sat on a panel with StumbledUpon.com’s Garrett Camp and NetVibe’s Tariq Krim.
“He was saying he’ll rely on people like the three of us to launch applications. Well, we’ve all launched applications. But if you look at the most popular ones, it’s, like, Pirates vs. Ninjas.”
Although neither Digg.com, StumbleUpon or NetVibe purports to be a social network, replacing a Facebook, each is a leader in new forms of social Internet use. NetVibes lets users pepper a personal dashboard with widgets. StumbledUpon is social search that lets users unearth sites that might be interesting to them. And with traffic that often rivals the New York Times Website, Digg lets users vote their favorite stories to the top of the site. All three were named among MIT Technology Review’s 35 innovators under the age of 35.
Rose had news about Digg: new features will include a suggestion service (If you dug this, you might digg that…) and an image section. He’s also working on predictive features that could suggest how popular a story might become based on very early patterns of interaction between the most passionate Digg users.
Particularly fascinating was Netvibes, the Paris and London-based site started in September 2005 by Krim. The jovial Parisian entrepreneur works under an assumption: In the not-so-distant future, Web users will enter the Web in new ways. Rather than starting on Google (GOOG) and navigating through their favorite pages online, they’ll have a landing page where they’ve assembled all of their favorite sites in small page-on-a-page boxes, or widgets. It’s the same bet Zuckerberg is making, of course, and he wants Web users to enter the Web on their social networking profiles.
Krim, however, thinks people want less structure. With NetVibes, he has designed an open landing page. You title it. You drag and drop your favorite widgets onto the page. One widget might track the top headlines in the New York Times Business Section, for example. Another might track the changes in your Facebook profile. And a third might alert you when you have new gmail messages.
There are no banner ads. There is no mugshot, no top friends, no wall on which those top friends post comments. By the end of the year, Krim hopes to add some social components – the ability to share your widgets, with friends, for example. But ultimately, Netvibes is a personal widget market place – publishers (often advertisers) list them and you choose whether to pull them on to your page.
It’s an idea that has attracted interest among valley legends. Netscape founder Marc Andreesson was among Krim’s angel investors. The site has less than $15 million in venture funding, led by Accel Partners in London. But Krim is the first to acknowledge these are early days for widgets. Publishers have to create more, better designed widgets. Advertisers need to figure out how best to advertise on them and through them, and how to sell that advertising.
And did I mention there are no plans for banner ads? Krim says Netvibes should be entirely neutral. There will be advertising, he says, but it will happen entirely through widgets, and those widgets will be added by users. The pressure is on advertisers to come up with creative ideas that appeal to users. But the users, according to Krim, are growing – to 10 million last month.
Will Facebook’s users tire of the traditional social networking structure and leap to Netvibes? It’s worth watching.
