How many of you iGoogle???
 

Anyone here try this yet? I tried myYahoo for a while and loved it..heard it brings in an enormous amount of revenue (as a business unit) for Yahoo..


http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/dat...le.php/3675046

Google Offers Personalized Page with iGoogle
May 1, 2007
By David Needle

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - Google feted a group of reporters at its Googleplex campus here to show off its latest efforts in personalization. The new services extend the features of Google's personalized home page service.

The Google personalized home page will now be known as iGoogle and use the same Web address. Google officials said Apple can rest easy though; this is the only service they said they plan to introduce with the "i" prefix.

One new feature slated to go live today on iGoogle is Gadget Maker, currently featuring seven consumer-oriented templates for creating personalized gadgets. To date, Google (Quote) had made gadgets available only to developers.

The gadgets can be published to a public directory for anyone to use or they can be sent as feeds to friends, family and colleagues who have the option whether to accept them. At this time, Google has no ad strategy or revenue model, it's all a free service.

The other new feature going live today is location-based personalized search results. Users who have provided a default location in Google maps will now get more personalized results based on that location. For example, someone with a southern California location who enters "surfing equipment" would get results in that geographic area.

Google has always been the epitome of the "clean" page, with its sparse home page and search box. But while the "classic" Google page remains, the company has been giving users more options to, depending on your point of view, clutter or enhance the page.

Google's personalized page was already looking more like a traditional portal with lots of entry points for different interests. Gadget Maker promises to increase the density.

Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search products & user experience, said the idea came out of a brainstorming session in 2004. "Someone said they didn't want a clean home page," she said. "And I was struck how customization would appeal to some users."

She said the personalized home page has been Google's fastest growing product, with tens of millions of users. Google is working to increase personalization so the algorithms behind the company's search engine will produce more specific results pertinent to the user's interests.

The system would learn from user's queries so, for example, if you typed in a query for Broadway shows, it would know your preferences (comedy, tragedy, etc.) and come back with top results best suited to those interests. "That's what we're shooting for," she said. "A search engine that understands 'me'."

The seven introductory Gadget Maker templates include:

A photo gadget for distributing photos to friends; Google Gram, a kind of progressive greeting card that can be set up to distribute with various updated messages each day; Daily Me, a "mini blog" for sending out short missives about yourself or particular topics; a personal list gadget for things like food shopping, favorite movies, etc.

Rounding out the list are a personalized countdown gadget for counting down to the date of a special event; YouTube video favorites gadget, which allows you to create and share a channel of your favorite YouTube videos; and Free form gadget, which offers ways to further customize gadgets.

Mayer told internetnews.com that just as other consumer technologies have bubbled up to the enterprise, such as Instant Message services, she thinks some of the latest Google services could too. "Customized intranet pages are a reasonably intriguing idea," she said.

This article was first published on InternetNews.com. To read the full article, click here.

I like the Yahoo setup. Just checked out the Google version and it looks like a cheap imitation.

my thoughts exactly...google usually takes things and makes it better....e.g. gmail search engine/mail...

Ive been using the google personalized page for about a year... this is old news.

sounds like a new thing to me

I am using iGoogle for a few months now, before that I used http://www.netvibes.com/ which is in some ways far better than Google exept that Google is (or was) faster.

I've just decided to switch back to Netvibes again ;)

just tried it...not bad :thumbsup

I have been using it for about a year. It's like everything else Google, simple, straightforward and un-cluttered.

I checked out Netvibes and Yahoo but neither are as good as Google unless you are a 40 year old housewife or 13 year old.

I have been using it for about a year. It's like everything else Google, simple, straightforward and un-cluttered.

I checked out Netvibes and Yahoo but neither are as good as Google unless you are a 40 year old housewife or 13 year old.

I like the "lineup" game on my igoogle

not yet ..

i use it on the daily.

Not old news, iGoogle is new. At least the name is. And Google's push to get people to use it is too. I've just recently started to use it since Google has been my home page anyways. Could use a few tweaks, but so far it's ncie.

They have new "themes". Most of the themes have a feature where the theme will reflect the time of day. I have the "beach" theme and right now it's night. The sun and moon rise and set and move throught the day.