Netvibes is prepping up a new, fully overhauled release of it’s latest version, Ginger, which will be out to every user of the service by mid-February. I was lucky enough to be able to sign up using TechCrunch’s 500 free invites for the pre-beta.  Since Netvibes is my primary RSS reader, I feel greatly honore. ^^

Netvibes is useful service that’s essentially a fully customizable start page. On it, you can add any supported widget like RSS feeds, notes, IMAP4 for emails, and others that you can drag and place anywhere you want.

Ginger not only provides some much needed backend optimizations to Netvibes but adds some tools and features so that anything on your page like feed, article, video, photo, song, widget, game can be used to create a shared, social content experience. Netvibes aims to contain everything you enjoy on the Web, available at a glance, all in one place. This means less time surfing for you and more time to enjoy the web.

Want news videos? Just add the CBS, USA Today widget

Want the latest on the net? Add newswire, digg and even wired..

For a quick comparison, click the links to see what the original netvibes and ginger looks like.

As of the moment, Netvibes is moving towards a social networking service that allows you to rate items in any feed or supported widget as a bookmarking feature. Netvibes has also included an activity stream so you can see what your friends are publicly starring and sharing as well but as of the moment, the internal messaging or PM system, is still down.

The biggest change for Ginger is that everything is now powered by the Netvibes UWA, meaning that all widgets are cross-compatible with OS X Dashboard, iGoogle, My Yahoo, Windows Vista Gadgets, the iPhone and other mobile platforms — and, by the public launch, Facebook widgets. Now you can add any widget from any platform to your Netvibes or vice-versa.

Netvibes is part of OpenSocial.