NetVibes, a customizable and sharable widget mashup portal (thingy?), announced a preview of support for the Universal Widget API standard with OpenSocial compatibility, as well as new layouts and a host of other features yesterday:

We also have excellent news for developers: we have a public preview of UWA (Universal Widget API) with OpenSocial compatibility. Developers can now create a new generation of smart, social widget that can easily tap into Users’ social networks and run on virtually all widget platforms and desktops.

The news also means that NetVibes is now compatible with the Google Gadget format.  More details over at their blog.

A few thoughts on this:

• Are mashup engines still cool, or were they ever cool?  I think the idea was good, but aside from developer interest, it seems like most consumers haven’t been really interested in mashup tools (like NetVibes, PageFlakes, Microsoft PopFly and others).
• Didn’t portals stop being cool after about 2004ish? The only two that are really left standing are Yahoo and MSN. Remember Excite?  And Lycos?  And even iWon.com back in the day?  Good times, good times.
• I’m a little lost as to the decision to provide only a few new layout styles, but not a more advanced layout editor tool.
• Mashups like the ones NetVibes provide seem to be outdated compared with RSS reader tools.  I can’t imagine throwing all the RSS feeds I read today onto a NetVibes home page and trying to sift through it all.  I’d get lost really fast.

Filed under: Consumer Web, Social Computing