Netvibes’ layout goes variable: there’s still a start page frontier waiting to be conquered

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.