Scrapplet Launches Netvibes Competitor

What started as a Facebook app has grown into a full-fledged stand-alone service that lets you make scrapbooks (of sorts) from web content you find interesting or have created elsewhere on the web. RadWebTech has just launched Scrapplet, an alternative to services like Netvibes or even Tumblr, as it lets you collect items from across the web as well as integrated content from social networking and microblogging sites.

It’s easy enough to make a Scrapplet: import photos from your MySpace or Facebook accounts, add friends from these social networks as well. Layer in your FriendFeed and Twitter stream, along with various RSS feeds. Find something you like while you’re surfing the web? You can pull it with Scrapplet’s Firefox browser plug-in.

What makes Scrapplet so easy to use, however, is its drag’n'drop interface for easy customization and organization of content. You can make as many Scrapplet pages as you’d like, similar to Netvibes. Scrapplet’s biggest differentiating factor, however, is probably its portability options, which let you take a given Scrapplet page and embed it elsewhere across the web (including Facebook and MySpace).

Its usability and smooth interface make Scrapplet an attractive tool, but given the number of aggregation services already out there I wonder how Scrapplet will make its service even more useful than it already is. So far, Scrapplet’s business model is pretty clear–it offers a premium account for an ad-free Scrapplet for about $2.95 per month.

But in terms of utilizing individuals’ actual pages and collections therein, making it searchable, further integrated with social networking platforms such as Facebook’s, and finding other uses for such collected data are all ways in which Scrapplet can continue to build out its service, which has already taken some significant leaps since its inception as a Facebook application.