myGoogle
Straight from the Google Labs comes the new Personalized Google Homepage, which I’ve dubbed myGoogle for short.
Google is launching a personalized home page tonight, which you can view now by going to the URL below. It’s basically a custom portal of your own Google services, like a Gmail preview and Google News highlihgts, as well as Word of the Day, Weather, and Wired News updates (they must be pretty happy about that).
Oh, and a search box. I forgot about that.
I’m not overly impressed by it.
I’ve been wondering when Google would get into the portal game to compete against the likes of Yahoo!, AOL and MSN… but this seems like a sub-par effort.
The personalizations that are available represent a good cross-section of info I actually would want displayed on myGoogle. The design is, well, boring, at best. Pretty much everything Google has done, with the exception of Google Maps, has been pretty bland when it comes to design. (Obviously, Picasa and Hello are exceptions to this.)
A few things to note:
Easy Sorting:
Drag and drop the modules you choose where you want them positioned on the page. This was pretty cool. Nicely implemented. Worked in Firefox. Did not test in IE.
Easy Personalization:
Select only what you want displayed and how you want it displayed. Choose how many articles, quotes, emails, etc. are displayed on the page at any given time. Easily edit the settings on the page to make it more to your liking. Worked in FireFox. Did not test in IE.
Overall Impression:
Not bad, not great. I’d like to see where they take this. But right now, I’m not overly impressed. I know it’s fresh from the labs, but I’ve come to expect a lot more from the folks over at Google. They need to really innovate if they hope to stay ahead of all of the competitors nipping at their heels right now. I do use Google.com as my primary search engine, and I use Gmail exclusively for my private email account, so I will use this new page as my main Google entry… I hope to see it evolve more, and soon.