Netvibes announced it will support Google’s OpenSocial specification, it’s been reported by Techcrunch’s Erick Schonfeld.

At the same time, Netvibes, the French company that makes the popular start page, says it will offer variable layouts, including a magazine-style start page. You can check out movies of the new options over on Techcrunch.

What I want? A canvas that lets you drag widgets around, disrespecting any grid, and resize them at will like windows on your desktop, or images within Photoshop, or Colorforms on their background.

I played around with a pre-coded console a few months that allows moving and resizing. I call it pre-coded because, unlike a real start page like iGoogle or Netvibes, it doesn’t let you choose widgets for it. It comes with widgets chosen for you. I designed it (actually, barely prototyped it) specifically to listen to NewsGang Live recordings, while following the chat that was happening at the time of the live recording, and while browsing the Tweet stream of regular participants and followers. 

Steve Gillmor recommended, and I agree, that it—and other pages containing distributed content—cries out for not just resizing and moving properties for the widgets, but the ability to save the positions and sizes of the widgets. I know that’s a possibility with Javascript; it knows how to report those numbers and I’m sure they can be captured. I’m just not clever enough with Javascript (yet) to make it happen. 

Netvibes is more popular than I imagined, at least among people who like Barack Obama. Since I put the inauguration countdown widget on Clearspring a week ago, almost as many Netvibes users as Google users have added it, maybe a 2:3 ratio, Netvibes to iGoogle. And remember that Google gadgets work in other places, though in my experience the other places are almost always blogs of the Google-owned Blogger service. 

In fact, I don’t want to retire it, so I started doodling with a days-in-office widget to replace it.

This is just a comp. Ideas are welcome.

I suppose, if things started to get rough for the new administration, the pencil points could wear down and break, and as time goes on some of the pencils would grow shorter.

Update: Things look different on a new day and now this looks to me like an ad. What is the aesthetic difference between a widget and an ad, anyway? It’s not a question of looking too slick, because many widgets are very smooth. Maybe in this case it’s the stock photo. Stock photos are great but they always make me feel like I’m being hustled, especially when they include smiling models. 

Videos are up from the Nov. 24 OpenSocial birthday gathering when developers and platform reps talked about the future. OpenSocial 0.9 is due out Dec. 19.

There are 600 million users across all the OpenSocial containers now. Sure, your widget won’t be seen by them all, not by a long shot, but the possibilities of a coalition like that are… well, forgive me, but it’s thrilling.

I may have to take back some of my initial impressions about Clearspring and other widget services.

When I first started considering the idea three or four years ago, I think I was bothered by the notion that widgets were shaping up to become an industry. I didn’t think they needed to be weighted down with monetization or tech industry hype. Because of their nature as part of a web page, widgets didn’t deserve to flower into a tech sub-sector any more than, say, an “About us” page, or a copyright footer. I believed that any site using a decent flexible CMS and employing halfway creative developers could make widgets on their own.

So, now I’m forced to moderate my opinion, and it’s still percolating. I’m still not sure if a big site—think about a big media property—should put the widget platform’s version of a widget on its own site, or if it should just offer a sharable version of it in widget directories.

I’ll be digging into it more; I want to look at the API and all of the other goodies I skipped over in my short tramp through the site this morning.

Just one criticism for now: for this particular widget that doesn’t need to take up a lot of vertical space, I didn’t like the requirement to make it at least 236px tall. I had to make a separate version of the search box HTML to accommodate the extra height, and I always hate having to remember to change multiple versions of things when you just want to make a little tweak. It could be I’m missing something. Let me know.

Here’s how it looks on my Netvibes page.

It’s a series of rotating, topical, pre-coded searches that reveal random news and crowd pulse discovery, or a laugh. Topics include politics, tech, and the passing scene for now, and they are all mixed into the rotation.

Once the archive has built up a little more, I might categorize them so you can see just one category or all of them. See the archives for a look at the searches that will appear in your widget.

The widget is a functioning form, so users can enter their own search terms and results from the same service (i.e. Twitter, Google blogs, Yahoo news) will be returned.

Easter egg: click on “Search this” to reload the widget and try a different search.

Write a comment to: suggest a new search or new category of searches; remind me if a search isn’t timely anymore; or to ask for help or customizations.