For those who are unfamilar with the website, Netvibes is a place where you can bring your RSS feeds together, add some special Netvibes widgets, and put them all on a stylish homepage. Using Netvibes, I am able to view all the headlines from my favorite technology blogs, have a section of my favorite bookmarked sites, see if there is any new e-mail in my Gmail account, watch the financial market, and see what TV show is airing tonight.

But Netvibes can be much more than that. It can allow you to search various types of content (blogs, images, video, and so on), help you keep track of your calendar, monitor your Alexa ratings, track down deals on craigslist, integrate social networks, show the latest videos from partnered websites, and so much more. I have barely touched on the amount of content available to Netvibes users.

The previous release of Netvibes, which is when I joined, was code named Coriander. When it comes to function, Coriander performed mostly the same way as Ginger does. At this stage in its life, Ginger redefines the style of Netvibes. The interface to add new content to your page has cleaned up considerably as the entire top portion of the site gets taken over by the Add Content interface when you select that menu option.

Aside from the menu interface, the main content section where all your feeds and widgets appear received a face lift with a re-designed border for each content block. Also for the RSS feeds, you can share a RSS entry with your friends as a favorite item. These items marked as a favorite will appear in the Activities menu at the top of the screen.

Then there is the new public Universe screen, where you can create a content page that can be shared by all viewers. All they have to do is enter your Universe URL and they are shown the custom page and all RSS feeds/widgets you published to that page. I haven’t had time to create a Universe page as of yet, but you can see my blank Universe here.

This weekend I plan on looking deeper into the new menu system and adding some content to my Universe page. If anything interesting comes out of it, I’ll discuss it here.