[LINK] iGoogle - Google wants you to express yourself.

Antony Barry tony at tony-barry.emu.id.au
Wed May 2 13:25:11 AEST 2007


Google wants you to express yourself.

The search giant is renaming and adding new features to Google  
Personalized Home Page, a product team said during a briefing with  
members of the media at company headquarters here on Monday.

In an effort to clarify Google's strategy on customisation, the  
company is changing the name of its Personalized Home Page product to  
iGoogle and announcing new features that were set to go live Tuesday  
after midnight PDT. The personalisation product allows people to  
create a customised portal with news, blog postings and other  
interactive information modules called "gadgets" for things like the  
local weather and -- the most popular -- the day and time. There are  
more than 25,000 gadgets that have been created.

iGoogle, as it will be called in a few hours, was the fastest growing  
product at the company last year, said Marissa Mayer, vice president  
of search products and user experience at Google. Personalisation is  
"one of the biggest advances we've made."

Among the enhancements, Google is announcing a new Gadget Maker  
feature that will let people create their own gadgets with their own  
content without having to know any code or HTML. There are seven  
templates of gadgets that people can create and share with others:  
Framed Photo for creating and updating photos; GoogleGram, an  
unfolding "greeting card" gadget that shows different messages and  
images over seven days; Daily Me, which lets people share snippets  
about their daily lives like a miniblog, such as how they are feeling  
or what they are thinking or doing; a YouTube gadget for a favourite  
video clip; Free Form, which is simply any text and image; Personal  
List, of things like favourite songs; and Countdown, for counting  
down days to events.

The company also is announcing a new area on the Gadget directory  
called My Community that will let people share the gadgets they've  
created with anyone in their Gmail contacts list.

Google also is expanding iGoogle globally to new languages and  
countries, reaching 26 languages and more than 40 countries, and  
launching themes for iGoogle users located outside the United States.  
"I think that themes will be an area in which we will continue to  
invest resources because they delight people," said iGoogle Product  
Manager Jessica Ewing. One concept the team is working on is creating  
themes that simulate specific artists. For instance, a French version  
of iGoogle could feature an image of brushstrokes from Monet's  
haystack paintings.

In addition, Google is launching location-based personalised search  
results so that users who have provided a default location in Google  
Maps will see results based on that location.

Earlier this month, Google launched Queryless Search, which lets  
people include on their toolbar a button that provides pages the  
system thinks the user might be interested in. Google also launched a  
"recommendations" tab on the home page that offers up searches,  
pages, groups and videos that might be of interest to the individual.

I'm an eclectic person but everybody is," said Sep Kamvar, technical  
lead of personalisation. "We can't just go about designing products  
for the average person."

There are no ads on iGoogle now, but Mayer wouldn't make any promises  
about the future. "I think of gadgets themselves as a unique and neat  
form of personalised advertising," she said. "Like our text ads, they  
are more useful and more relevant."

Google is working to not only make it easy for people to create  
customised home pages with colorful and fun gadgets but also to make  
it even easier to use Web search when trying to get to information,  
Mayer said. Eventually, 15 years out or so, Google wants to know  
enough about you that you don't have to type in long keyword queries.

For example, "when you type things into the search box it basically  
augments your query," she said. "If I type 'broadway shows' into  
Google it would actually come back and understand that I like  
musicals and like peppy to sad…on the whole that's what we're really  
shooting for."

Source: <http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/Welcome-to-iGoogle/ 
0,130061733,339275160,00.htm>

phone : 02 6241 7659 | mailto:me at Tony-Barry.emu.id.au
mobile: 04 1242 0397 | mailto:tony.barry at alianet.alia.org.au
http://tony-barry.emu.id.au






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