Today, Netvibes will add support for multiple personalized pages. I’ve had the opportunity to check it out in advance. Now with one account I can create several pages, each page with a unique set of tabs. As a consultant who works with many clients, I love being able to separate the monitoring that I do for each client without having to keep track of multiple Netvibes logins. You can customize the look and feel of each page to add a logo or custom color scheme to easily tell at a glance which page you are viewing.

You can also publish these pages, which is a great way to share information with others. Sharing pages has a few interesting uses. You could share a page with all of your content from various sources as a visual life stream with certain components prioritized over others based on tab or page placement. Or you could use these public pages to share collections of interesting information with people. Right now, I share collections of RSS feeds as OPML files, which works great for highly technical users, but I’ve found that many of the people I work with are unlikely to know what to do with them.

For the more technical users, Netvibes has supported OPML export from the earliest versions of the service, but the OPML files available weren’t particularly useful. Previously, the OPML export put all of your tabs into one big file, making it difficult to share only portions of your feeds with people using other RSS readers. While the OPML export still exports all of your tabs, now it exports them per page, which is more manageable and makes it easier to share content with other people or to back up your feeds before making extensive changes. I also like to export all of the feeds I set up before sharing them with a client, so that I have a snapshot containing the exact feeds that I delivered as part of the dashboard.

Netvibes makes it very easy to rearrange your pages, but even more importantly, you can also quickly move and copy tabs between the pages. A great way to get started with a new page is by copying existing tabs from other pages, and reusing common tabs across different pages. Keep in mind that it only creates a copy of the tab, so if you make changes to a tab that appears on multiple pages, you will have to make the change on each copied tab. This also means that you can copy a tab to another page and make tweaks to it for a particular situation without having the changes unexpectedly propagate to the other pages.

I really like the multiple personalized page support in Netvibes, since it solves previous pain points related to segmenting information and exporting OPML files. The good news is that Netvibes, a company that has been quietly growing,  says that multiple pages are just the first in a set of new features that it plans to make available in future releases.

What do you think about these new Netvibes features?

I love information and wish I could spend more time reading and consuming it, to learn more about a variety of topics. However, the harsh reality is that there are only so many hours in the day that I can spend reading and learning. I could take the easy way out and just read less, but my goal is to become more efficient at finding the content that I want to read the most.

Pruning your feeds is a good way to start. Fellow WWD blogger Celine Roque wrote a great article about how to fine-tune your RSS subscriptions a few months ago. Dead feeds and feeds that you rarely read only slow down the process of finding the content that you really need. I have a tendency to add blogs to my reader based on one or two great posts, but sometimes those blogs just don’t keep my interest and must be pruned later. I try to go through my RSS reader a few times a year and focus on getting rid of, or de-prioritizing, feeds that add less value or aren’t being regularly updated any more. Some feed readers even have tools for finding those old blogs that aren’t being updated regularly (dinosaurs) and the blogs that currently get the least amount of your attention.

I also make extensive use of filtering to reduce the amount of content in my feeds. Yahoo Pipes is a great filtering tool, since you can use it to combine many RSS feeds and only display posts that match certain key words that are the most interesting to you. I use Yahoo Pipes to filter groups of blogs that typically have low relevancy for me but have occasional great nuggets of information that I don’t want to miss.  With Pipes, I can make sure that I only see the nuggets, and not the posts that contain less interesting topics.

Use an RSS reader that gives you a way to organize your feeds and use it as a way to prioritize the things that you should read more often. I use NetNewsWire, which gives me the ability to create folders and move them up or down the list. The things that I need to read every day are at the top, while the blogs that I read only occasionally are near the bottom.

When working with clients who don’t already use a reader, I usually set them up with Netvibes, which has more of a dashboard feel. In this case, I organize their feeds with the top priorities in the upper left, lower priorities in the lower right and multiple tabs to group topics. It doesn’t really matter how you organize the information as long as it helps you prioritize your reading.

Take the time to learn the keyboard shortcuts for your feed reader. I can get through the material more quickly when I use a few keys to navigate through the content. In my case, NetNewsWire lets you use arrow keys, the space bar and other keys to navigate through the content, mark items as read/unread, open in a browser, collapse/expand folders, and more. Navigating the menu items to find these functions can sometimes take more time than you realize.

It also helps me to think of feeds as a stream that flows through my RSS reader. I don’t try to catch up by reading everything, and I don’t worry about leaving unread items in my reader. I read what I can with the time I have available and don’t spend any time worrying about the rest. There will always be more interesting content than I can ever read in a lifetime.

What are your tips for getting through your RSS feeds more quickly and efficiently?

PersonAll, a French company, wants to bring this type of functionality to your corporate intranet.  Their technology sits behind your companies’ firewall, allowing for access to corporate resources that a hosted solution would have issues with.  Corporate users can aggregate information such as emails, calendars, intranet publications and customize it to create a personalized intranet page that they’ll find value from.

For more information, watch the video below.

There is also a PersonAll product aimed at allowing companies to turn their public facing Internet sites into customizable PersonAll sites as well.  The Audience mode can take your Internet site’s resources and mix a personalized website to meet their needs.  The company, through the use of PersonAll, knowing which modules and information sets are being used, can embed customized advertisements based on the consumer’s tastes and preferences.  Again, a video is available for reference.

The service will be available on April 24.  The company plans a US expansion within the next year.