This is not a paid advertisement

...it's just something that's pretty damned cool.

I'd been seeing referrals from Netvibes in my logs for a while. Then Gene mentioned it in his most recent post. So, I thought I'd check it out.

I spent a couple hours today setting up what I titled "Mt. Otis Command Central." Much like Bloglines, my DVR, and my Bose QC3s, I'm not sure how I ever got by without Netvibes. Now, my homepage tells me whether my inbox at two different web-based e-mail addresses has any new mail for me. It gives me the four-day forecast for my hometown. It has a to-do list, a widget that tells me how many unread posts I have waiting for me on Bloglines. BoingBoing's feed is featured prominently, as is a custom Google Blog Search phrase. Oh, and I have it set to bring up the most recent image search for Scarlett Johansson and 20 thumbnails of said search.

My son's favorite widget is a box that has five different colored fish swimming around a custom aquarium. I click of the cursor drops food and the fish come in for a mini-frenzy. My kid has named the black fish Joey and the yellow fish Terrence. The other three fish are currently nameless.

And it's all on one page.

In total, there are about 500 different widgets you can put on your Netvibes pages. I've just scratched the surface. I think it's going to save me a lot of time in my day that I would spend jumping from one page to another.

So, if you haven't used Netvibes, give it a try. If you're already a user and have any widget recommendations, leave them in the comments.