Netvibes and portals

Like Yahoo and Google, but
* with widgets from anywhere to get out of the walled garden
* with lovely slideable ajax boxes that want to be a common design pattern
I hate the “everything-one-one-browser-screen”. It is horribly distracting. Multiple Windows are good.
Back in the day, I used to use a 3M sticky note application that let you type things on stickynotes and organize them on bulletin boards. Only problem was it had godawful memory behavior and if you had too much information it would kill your computer’s performance.
So, like NetVibes but with desktop widgets you can move around, bundle and snap together. Or a physical gizmo, the size of a deck of cards, with 5 or 7 or 12 display cards held together with a keyring. Plastic cards with a matt finish, slightly raised edges like coins, and a display. You can shuffle them so you see one or two or three at a time, or collapse them together. Each one is a widget; a clock or feedreader or a calendar. You configure the widget set from your desktop computer.
In front of your attention when you want it. Away and closed up when you don’t.

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