Rojo vs. Netvibes

It is difficult to actually compare these two web services. Rojo and Netvibes, while both providing RSS aggregating services, are actually quite different. While I would suggest that both companies would love to have you make their page your homepage, they offer very different reasons for doing so.

Rojo, in offering social networking features such as contacts (making friends with other Rojo users) and tagging, voting, etc. is forced to try and bring users into a new system. They are in a sense attempting to compete with services such as Facebook, in the sense that they want you to communicate news about the world (and presumably yourself) through Rojo. Given the vast array of choices in social networking software these days, I think that Rojo is facing an uphill battle. This idea of have RSS friends is really the only feature available in Rojo that I haven't seen in any other RSS-focused software. The tagging and voting, etc. has been covered by applications such as Digg, Redit, etc.

Netvibes has a very different strategy. They are providing a platform for clustering all of the social networking and news related services you already use onto one homepage. This is similar to other services such as Google's customizable homepages. This seems like a much more appealing option to me, because I already feel bogged down by the number of online services I subscribe to. If I can have them all in one place, that works well for me.