Google Personalized Homepage – Yet Another AJAX App?

Google’s services and applications are thought of more as detached rather than unified, and it’s only recently that the company has begun to market unified applications. Take for example Gmail and Google talk, which have been in peaceful, side-by-side coexistence until the Chat feature was merged into Gmail a few weeks ago. In a way, the Google personalized homepage is also like this, since it combines several of Google’s features—and a lot more—into one single page.

Simply log in to http://www.google.com/ig and you’ll see what I mean. Of course, you’ll be needing your own Google account (a Gmail login will usually suffice) to enjoy this service. Once you’re in, you are presented a few in-browser “windows” by default, such as latest news and your most recent searches.

Personalization

Now what’s great about Google Personalized Homepage is that you can, well, personalize it to your heart’s content! Being another AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) application, the system works like that familiar Gmail interface, where information is updated without the page reloading. And what’s really great is that you can actually drag around the information window-lets and sort according to your preference.

You can add content by clicking on the “Add Content” box on the upper-left portion of the homepage. A list of common information sources will be presented, including the following:

• My Stuff – Movies, stock market, weather
• News – NY Times, Washington Post, USA Today, BBC, ABC, Reuters, CNN
• Business – Motley Fool, Fast Company, Forbes, CNN Money
• Technology – Wired
• Sports – ESPN, Fox, Sports Illustrated, CBS
• Lifestyle – eDiet News, MSNBC, NPR Recommendations, People Magazine, Simply Recipe
• Fun – “How to” of the day

XML Feeds and more

And here’s what’s even better: Google Personalized Homepage supports XML feeds! This means you can syndicate any site that churns out RSS or Atom feeds, which means basically 99% of blogs and most major news services.

Here’s even more: You can click the “More Content” link and it will bring up a list of third-party add-ons you can use (also accessible through http://www.google.com/ig/directory). There are about 300 third-party-developed modules as of this writing, and these include useful—and sometimes useless—utilities like clocks, SMS senders, newsfeeds, and the like.

Closing apps

What do you do if you get tired of an applet or newsfeed? Simply click on the “X” icon and it will go away. Or, you can click “edit” to change some options related to that particular window-let.

If you get tired of the Personalized Homepage itself, simply click on the “Classic Home” link and you’ll return right back to that minimalist Google search homepage.