Google's New Personalized Homepage

jgaynor writes "Citing user requests to coalesce its disparate services, Google today released its new personalized homepage service. It allows you to arrange your Gmail, Google News, Google Maps driving directions, weather and a few select news services (including Slashdot) on a single page. Future plans include Universal RSS support. Clearly a shot at existing services like My Yahoo."

Comments

There it is!

[jackcarter]

The start of the cluttered Yahoo-like interface. the fact that Google is clean and white is the reason most people flocked to it at first. At least the customization means that I can make it what I want.

Re:There it is!

[Stibidor]

I believe the "cluttered Yahoo-like interface" is somewhat popular.

Google is still "clean and white" if you leave the "/ig" off the end of the URL.

And yes, you can make it what you want. :)

Re:There it is!

[Monkeman]

I like it, specifically because it's "underwhelming" and "far behind" the atrocity that is My Yahoo. It runs off of a cookie, you don't need an account and it's still nice and minimalistic. Also: am I the only one who spent like five minutes putting each module on the page and dragging them around?

Re:There it is!

[hazem]

It's not the clutter per se that bothers me at Yahoo. It's all the friggin flashing, blinking, and pop-up ads.

As for google... if they want to put all the stuff I like on one page, more power to them. Just don't clutter it with flashing, blinking, epileptic-fit-inducing ads.

Re:There it is!

[tylernt]

Isn't this the way that Google improves search results and updates PageRank etc? By tracking which links get clicked?

If Google didn't track anything, their search algorythms would probably be a lot less efficient because they wouldn't be able to tell which of the search results were the ones that users found relevent.

Notice the differences though

[Stevyn]

between google and yahoo. Google's is clean and compact while yahoo's is all over the place. People want simplicity and when so much information is displayed at once like on lots of portals, it's difficult to find anything.

Re:Notice the differences though

[JasontheMason]

Google is cleaner but displays less and their colour scheme chould do with some work.

It looks to me pretty much like the 'Google Blue' they use on their search results pages. Personal preference, of course, but I just think it looks like Google.

The edit option displays very poorly against a similar shade background.

It would be my personal inclination to design them that way. It's there when you need it, when you need it you can see it, but otherwise it's less obtrusive. I don't plan on changing things around more than a couple times a week, and for that it is plenty visible. The rest of the time it presents no visual distraction from the things I want to see. This is probably a very nit-picky sort of point, though.

Re:Anyone else note the GoogleDot effect?

[EnronHaliburton2004]

Because they're trying to appeal to geeks who want to try cutting edge technology first?

Maybe it's a reciprocal agreement. If Slashdot uses a Google News Story several times a day, Google will link to Slashdot?

Pretty weak so far

[prostoalex]

The interface is nice and clean, but it's still not My Yahoo!

- No outside RSS feeds, so can't add anything beyond pre-selected sources
- No user-selected color coding, so semantically the boxes are barely distinguishable
- Small things, like inability to select a subset of Google news, not just top stories

All fixable, and it's obviously a beta, but it's surprisingly a really raw beta.

Saved searches from a long time ago resurface.

[H01M35]

The first thing that jumped out at me once I personalized my googlepage was that /lots/ of saved searches from a long time ago showed up in a drop down from the search bar.

Hopefully for the rest of you your googlepage doesn't fall into the wrong hands. If people were to find out what you had been searching for, how would they feel? How would you feel?

Heck, I felt a bit violated and it was only /me/ that saw them.

GoogleScript

[etheriel]

We're always going to dissatisfied with some aspect of these kind of personalized homepages - because ultimately our options a limited to their imagination. So, what if google created some kind of rss/html/etc. aware scripting language that let us *really* personalize our homepage? (ok, maybe a reduced version of some existing scripting language would be better.)

I'd like to open my google-homepage and see if anyone has replied to my comments on slashdot/some random forum/etc; I'd also like to use a small chunk of my gmail storage to synchronize my bookmarks to, then display a bookmarks browser on my google-homepage. So why can't i hack these things together? Half the reason I'm not switching back to ie when it finally gets tabbed browsing (the feature that originally attracted me to firefox), is that i'd miss all my old plugins. if google could pull of some kind of system like i've just described, i'm sure a lot of their use base will be sticking with them for a while.

Re:greeeeeeeaaaat

[pediddle]

It may look so 90s, but Reply-To only doesn't work in mailers from the 80s!

(Feel free to correct me by naming one in which it doesn't work.)

Integrated browser search box

[Kris_J]

I do the vast majority of my searches from the little search box next to Firefox's address box. Those that aren't done from there are done from a results page. How many people still go to the Google front page to initiate a search?

TV show module

[hahn]

You know what would be a KILLER idea? If you could list what TV shows or TYPES of TV shows your interested in, and then it lists when they're showing in the next week with a countdown of how long before the show begins (kinda like when bidding is going to end E-Bay style) and whether it's a new episode or re-run. If you want to browse what's coming up in the next 3 hours, it would list shows according to the CURRENT time and based on what you've been interested in before or based on your ratings of a show (Tivo thumbs up/down style).

It would be MUCH better than the cluttered and space wasting TV Guide-style TV listing that Yahoo currently uses. The Yahoo one is also frustrating in that it's not smart about the time listing it shows. It can be 10 am and it will still show you the 8-11 pm prime time block. Even on weekends.

Re:Anyone else note the GoogleDot effect?

[kavau]

Despite all conspiracy theories, I think the reason is simply that the programmers who implemented the customized homepage are avid Slashdot readers.

iGoogle, or "clutter it yourself"

[uioreanu]

It's a really clever approach to the yahoo-like cluttered all-in-one environment. Basically you get to the cluttered environment by stuffing pieces yourself. Google avoids the yahoo trap by giving power to the user.

Re:One page to rule them all...

[emilymildew]

Do ANY of these "portal" sites offer something that we can't all whip up in a few minutes with HTML/CSS?

I'm very glad you can do better; some people would prefer to spend their time using the information rather than getting things set up to see it. That isn't meant to be mean.