As soon as I finish this post, I’m going to start work on customizing my NetVibes page.

I just discovered NetVibes because it showed up in my referrer log, but apparently its been around since September 2005 or so.

Netvibes is built on Ajax using many of the same principles as the Google customized home page, but a tiny bit slicker and more advanced.

I’ve been using a customized home page of one kind or another for six or seven years. I used to build my own in ColdFusion, then about a year ago I started using the Google personalized page, which I liked enough to not want to hassle with rebuilding my own page (which became out of date when I changed jobs), but what I see of NetVibes so far, I think this is a keeper.

No news site that I’m aware of has given customization a serious try in a number of years. I know the initial experiments didn’t go well, but that was before the invention of Ajax. Personalization is the wave of the future, but I think we can pretty much predict that news sites will be left in the dust of this innovation as well. However, if you want some ideas on where to begin with imagining what a customized newspaper.com site might start with, look at Google’s personalized page and NetVibes.