The RSS experiment: Netvibes
It's already week #6 in The Great RSS Experiment, and I've spent this past week using Netvibes. Netvibes is probably the most Web-2.0-ish of the readers I've covered so far, and it's a solid hybrid of RSS reader and personalized home-page.Although I'm not typically wowed by customizability features, Netvibes was the first reader that really gave me the control that I wanted. It's highly customizable, including removing things like header elements at the top to save space (unlike MyYahoo and Google Homepage where the built-in components take up a huge amount of screen real-estate).
Usability: 3/4 
Like many Web 2.0 creations, Netvibes does overwhelm you with options at first and can take some getting used to. Past that point, though, the interface is extremely easy to use, and you can customize a number of usability preferences (such as opening articles in Netvibes or on their original site). With strong customizability and multiple columns and tabs, Netvibes can pack a lot of content into a fairly small space while keeping it organized and usable. Probably my only complaint about Netvibes was that, when you first visit your page, updating all of the content can be slow. I found Netvibes operated best when left open in a separate browser window or tab.
Features: 3/4
Unlike some of the other readers with personalized home-page features, Netvibes provides good control over your RSS feeds, allowing you to customize what gets displayed, open and close your feeds to save space, and easily track read/unread articles. I also found the personalized home-page components, such as weather, worked well. Netvibes allows almost total control of each feed, and if you're a control freak like me, that's a big benefit.
Netvibes Recap
I have to confess that I used Netvibes once before this week, and really liked it. Toying around with Netvibes was one of the reasons I decided to see what was out there in the RSS reader world. I find Netvibes to be a strong contender, especially if you like the flexibility and control of a Web 2.0 application. I do have to admit, though, that I missed my Bloglines notifier.
Up next time is Pageflakes, but I'm afraid you won't see it for another three weeks (May 25). The debabblog is on hiatus for a while starting tomorrow, as my wife and I are taking an extended vacation.
