The Middlebury College Communications office recently started to use NetVibes for Middlebury Online. NetVibes is a best known as a personal news aggregator, similar to iGoogle, PageFlakes and myYahoo, that allows users to create their own personalized portal. All of these tools allow users to aggregate and layout content from various sources. All will allow you to include RSS feeds from other sites. Many will also allow you to include views of email accounts, social networks, seach engines and various widgets. Unfortunately, each has their own APIs and terminology (pages, tabs, gadgets, flakes, modules…) for adding content, though this may be changing. NetVibes now has an open widget platform that allows users to make their own widgets that can work on other platforms. More recently, some of these sites (PageFlakes, myYahoo, NetVibes) have started to allow users, individuals or organization, to share their pages/pagecasts/universes, as Middlebury has done with Middlebury Online.
(Segue v2 borrows many UI concepts from these new aggregation sites including the notion of multiple content blocks on a page that can be organized by dragging and dropping them within a customizable layout. As well, the ability to edit and change the settings of a content block inline. Much of this is made possible by the use of asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX), that allows changes to be made to be made without reloading the page, resulting in a greater responsiveness and interactivity.)