Google Portal
It looks like Google has launched another service without much fanfare. Gmail’s “New Features” list modestly advertises the new service as “Personalize the Google homepage”, but it looks pretty much like a full featured portal. You can choose which content to display on the home page. Available choices include Gmail (top N messages), weather, stocks, bookmarks, news, arbitrary RSS feeds, search history, and more.
I’m not quite sure if I like it, even though it could undoubtedly be useful. But after adding a few blocks of content to the site, it starts to feel a bit cluttered (particularly in contrast to the extremely lightweight standard Google homepage). I can’t help but think of Yahoo, which started out as a simple Internet directory and later exploded into the portal it represents now. Yahoo now offers many great services, but these come at a cost of navigatability (is this a word?). I hope Google doesn’t go too far in that direction. Interestingly, Google does not mention the word “Portal” anywhere in context with the new personalization feature.
I think I’ll play with the new home page a little over the next few weeks and see if it grows on me.
September 19th, 2005 at 9:16 am
“Navigatability” is not a word, but “navigability” is.
September 19th, 2005 at 10:21 pm
I’ve been told that this service has actually been around for over a month. Once more it seems like I’m just late to the party.
Still, it’s surprising that Google isn’t marketing this service more aggressively. The only link I can find is the one on the “New Features” page for Gmail. I can’t find any links on the list of Google services.
It’s almost like they’re not sure this is the direction they want to go, and they only reluctantly offer this service because some people have been asking about it.