Netvibes, RSS Feed, Homepage, Personal, Personal Homepage

I have recently discovered Netvibes, a drastically “Web 2.0” personal portal that I have fallen in love with. Netvibes allows users to customize the page with various modules, including RSS Feeds, Weather reports, Notes, To-Do Lists, and more - all without registering. If you would like to view your page from any computer, a simple registration and login structure allows you to do so.

The reason I have grown so fond of Netvibes (and the reason I leave it’s browser window open all the time) is it’s RSS Reader. Currently, my deployed network, filters out various websites I read on a daily basis. Problogger, Performancing, Matt Cutts, and various others are all blocked under the “Message Boards and Clubs” filter. With Netvibes, and a little help from Google, I can get the URL of the RSS feed, plug that into my personal homepage, and I still enjoy the articles these websites publish.

I have found only a few minor faults with Netvibes, some of which I can’t actually pinpoint on Netvibes themselves.

My PopMail Modules, which monitor my various email accounts always report mail as being unread. This may or may not be a Netvibes issue, although I believe it is - when I login to the Webmail client for these account these messages are seen as read.
I wish there was a way to tag and then hide/show feeds based on tags. I currently have 18 feeds on my netvibes page and it is becoming quite difficult to organize them logically in the 3 provided columns.
I wish I could add a fourth column.
I wish I could resize the RSS Reader, there are times I would like to see the first column (which contains 2 Note modules: one for my phone card info, and another for phone numbers) as well as read the RSS feeds.
I wish there was a Contacts module, Notes can get cluttered quickly.
I wish the coloring of modules colored the entire module and not just the title bar (or writing area, in the case of notes)
If you have yet to give Netvibes a shot, I recommend it. I was never a fan of RSS Feeds until I was limited on my browsing abilities - now I can’t get enough of them! Unfortunately, many websites (Darren) don’t provide their entire article within their feed. If you are one of these people, please consider offering a full-text feed for those of us who can’t visit your website due to circumstances beyond our control.