Online Research Toolkit

Netvibes (http://www.netvibes.com/) is one of a growing number of Online Desktops. These services are meant to aggregate as much of your online life as possible onto one private page. You can link (and sometimes view) your email, create notes, to do lists, and calendars, read blogs and other RSS feeds, and link to other Web 2.0 services, like Flickr (photo sharing), Writely (word processors), Box.net (file storage), and del.icio.us (links).

Update: Here’s a great example of using an online desktop for teaching: Owen James’ HigherEdBlogCon presentation and his SuperGlu site. Anything that has an RSS feed can be added, so I put in my RSSCalendar feed. (I tried my Reader2 feed, but it wouldn’t validate.)

There are other online desktops with different features and different linked services. Some of the others are Groowy (Flash based–watch out for the contacts import if you don’t want to send invites to everyone you know!), Protopage (public view), Pageflakes (multi-page organization), Microsoft’s Windows Live (integration with Microsoft products like MSN Search and Hotmail, including a potential link with Office Live), MyYahoo! (coordinated with Yahoo services) and Fold (a beta test with some interesting “foldlets”, cookie based, i.e. single computer use).

Another word about security: I’m going to keep hammering on this every chance I get. When you sign up for these services and enter in your email, contacts, or other personal information, remember that you are sending that info off to a third party. Groowy caused a big stink by having the “send invites” box checked by default when you import contacts. They’ve fixed it, but a lot of people are really annoyed (I didn’t import my contacts when I tested Groowy). Several of these services have you enter your email and other service passwords to display information. Consider carefully if you want your passwords stored on someone else’s server. You can always just put a link to the service in a note, so that you can click through. (Also remember that most of the email boxes just show the most recent emails received at your account, pre-filter–in the case of my work email that’s mostly spam these days. Do you really need to look at that all the time?) Some services have a public view, so you need to consider what you want to show the world, but even the private ones are stored somewhere under varying security. You probably shouldn’t use these services for sensitive or confidential information.