Despite all the hype I’ve managed to create at my old workplace around Netvibes, I came to a conclusion last night: I’m still dissatisfied with the “personalized news” offerings.  Why?  I’m realizing it’s not so personalized.

Netvibes is superb — it’s certainly my favorite “personalized home page” of the ‘net, and its layout, customization and flexibilty make it far superior to iGoogle and all the other offerings.  It’s even my start page.  But, despite its strengths, I don’t find myself using it extensively.  There’s just too much on this page.

So last night, I decided to re-check all of the “personalized news” offerings that exist on the web.  Those are the pages that generate schemas of what kind of news you like, and try to bring you content that you’ll find relevant — based on your previous history.  Theoretically, this would cut the “noise” (buzzword alert, I apologize) and bring me things that I care about.  Yeah, but they don’t, and I’ve found that despite the excitement around these services a year ago, very little has changed and it seems like the concept is dead in the water.

The first one I re-checked was Spotback.  It’s been around for a bit — I remember checking this one our a year ago or so.  Except it doesn’t bring you more than one story per subject (i.e. Sports or Technology), so it makes for a fairly useless start page.  Also, it’s been outcast from www.spotback.com and is now at news.spotback.com, which tells you leaps and bounds about the development of this project (as in, it’s probably dead).

Findory is ugly.   It also seems like the only subject is “news,” which is kind of broad.  I pretty much closed the window on that one right away.  I also skipped on My Yahoo, because it seems like just another Netvibes clone.

It looks like my news miseries will continue for now.  Am I being unreasonable, or is this really an area that’s lacking a true heavyweight that can actually do this stuff?

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