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There's a war being fought over ownership of your identity. Today Netvibes launches the Facebook Widget, which lets you view your Facebook notifications and friends within Netvibes.
Data displayed includes links to your profile, friends and networks, and the usual counters for the number of unread messages, friend requests, group invites, pokes and events invites. Birthdays are also included, plus the ability to search all your friends. You can browse your friends using Detailed or Photo views.
Meanwhile, Netvibes points out that you can't view your news feed within Netvibes, and asks users to petition Facebook and change this. Here's the thing: Facebook is now one of Netvibes' biggest rivals. Before Facebook, who offered to aggregate your friend's Flickr photos, YouTube videos, blogs and the rest? Netvibes, of course. In fact, Facebook profiles are now a lot like a Netvibes startpage.
So now that Facebook has stolen some of that sheen, they'd obviously like to create a mini-Facebook within Netvibes, rather than losing users in the other direction. They want you to use Netvibes as your homepage, and visit Facebook only incidentally, rather than aggregating all your stuff at Facebook and never returning to Netvibes.