I have written on Netvibes recently, specifically their work on creating an API (albeit later than their competitors). Today, Francois from the Netvibes team gave me a quick preview of what’s coming soon for Netvibes: iCal support and the mini API.

There’s really not a whole lot to say on the iCal support, other than it works just as you would expect. You give the widget an iCal URL, date format, time format, and the number of events you would like to retrieve at a time and it takes care of the rest.

The real news coming from this session is the Netvibes mini API, if you could call it that. The best way to explain the Netvibes mini API is it acts as an iframe on the page. You select the Mini API widget, enter the URL to the custom widget you want, and it’s added to your Netvibes page.

The choice to make widget developers host their widgets on their own server is a unique one. On one hand you will see a faster development to release cycle, but you risk availability, marketing, and overall quality by not having some sort of submission method in place. Hopefully Netvibes will develop a strong “third-party to first-party” program allowing widget developers to get their creations hosted on the Netvibes servers and available directly within the content addition window.

The process of creating your own widget based on the Netvibes mini API is very simple in fact, for an experienced web developer. A Netvibes widget is nothing more than an XHTML 1.0 Strict webpage - that’s it! Of course, if you want to offer any sort of decent functionality you’ll need to work a little (insert your favorite server-side language here) magic. Netvibes also offers a standard CSS file as well as some Javascript to ensure a consistent design throughout all of the widgets.

The develop cycle looks fairly easy and based on the popularity of Netvibes within this niche, one can only assume this developer community will build quickly and offer a lot of great features to the Netvibes interface. You can give a test run of both of these features on Netvibes’ preview server.