A Dashboard That Lets You Easily Connect Web Services, From Email to Twitter

Netvibes

Netvibes is known for a website that lets you pull all your favorite internet services onto a single page, from news sites to email to weather. But now it’s taking a different turn.

The Paris-based company will soon offer a new service dubbed Dashboard of Things, which aims to provide a single place you can not only consume all sorts of internet content, but also automate your digital life. With this new tool—which is being previewed now and will be widely available later this year—you could program Instagram to automatically backup your photos to Dropbox, or tell Twitter to send out a tweet every time you update your website.

For Netvibes CEO Freddy Mini, Dashboard of Things aims to help the average consumer do things they typically couldn’t pull off without some serious computer coding skills. “We need to make everyone a programmer,” he says. “We want you to be a wizard of the Internet of Things and to do magical things.”

Netvibes—a subsidiary of French software company Dassault Systèmes—isn’t the only company making that promise. The most famous is IFTTT, short for “If This, Then That,” and various others seek to automate the net in similar ways.

Mini and Netvibes aims to give you more power, while still keeping things dead simple. Instead of limiting you to just one one “if” and one “that,” Netvibes will give the choice of creating multiple triggers and actions. In other words, it gives you choices like “if all of these, then that” or “if one of these, then this and that.”

And if that doesn’t let you do everything you want, you can use the Netvibes Programming Language, a simple language, created by the company, that lets you further customize your custom programs—or potions, as Netvibes calls them.

The basic dashboard will be free. But you’ll be limited to five active potions. To set up more you’ll have to set up a”VIP” account, which will set you back two euro a month. Typically, Netvibes also pulls in revenue by selling beefed up versions of its software that let help companies keep track stuff like social media campaigns, and according to Mini, the company will likely do something similar the new service as well.