Google Gets Into Personalization

Google has released something new into the labs. This time it's the option to personalize one's homepage. Funny, very shortly before that TW sent me a note about the vast starkness of Google's homepage. Was that a wink wink nudge nudge TW? Sorry to be so slow on the uptake... basically what you're looking at here is the option to turn Google into a portal.

Pardon me for a moment.

(AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!)

Thank you.

Anyway, go to Google Labs and choose "Personalize Your Homepage" or just go straight to http://www.google.com/ig . The layout on the front page is nice and clean. Hmm, if I can add any RSS feed to the customization, this might be rather useful. I could add a couple of API-generated Google search RSS feeds, a couple of blogs, a...

I shouldn't have gotten so enthused. What you can add as content to the personalized homepage is fairly limited; a mere dozen items including weather, news, stock quotes, and driving directions. Yay. You can't even get the old standard of portals, sports scores.

I know that this relase, as all of Google's other releases, is beta. And I know that the fact that it's beta is supposed to excuse a lot of weakness.

But COME ON. This is thin, this is weak. A setup like this would have been pretty marginal in 1999. But now, with eighty billion RSS feeds out there, it's not only marginal but depressing. How about some functionality to add the RSS feeds that I care about?

Don't want to do that? Fine. How about adding some pointers to GOOGLE'S functionality? Pointers to Froogle content, perhaps, or a daily note about some lesser-known Google feature? In addition to a word of the day how about a syntax of the day?

I am not a big fan of portals but I realize that some people enjoy them. If Google's going to offer personalization technology, they need to either do it or not. Offering twelve modules isn't going to cut it. I see on Google's blog post about this release that they "envision being able to accept any standardized feed very soon." Good, because until then this is just ... rrgh. I wish they had waited to release this.

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