Google gets personal with iGoogle
Google renamed its personalized home page iGoogle, an effort to sex up the branding of a service that is its fastest growing.
Here is the iGoogle page.
Adding to its existing “gadget” offerings for your iGoogle page, Google additionally gives you today a photo album, a Googlegram (a week-long greeting message to someone), a Daily Me channel (where you can say what you’re currently doing, similar to the function served by competitor Twitter) a Freeform feature and a YouTube favorites channel that can be shared with friends, and more.
Google is trying to become more social, and is catching up with Yahoo, which has explored social features more aggressively over the past two years.
Here’s a good blog summary of the unveiling of iGoogle.
Google’s Sepandar Kamvar suggested it was yet another way to track what each person finds important, giving Google more knowledge to be able to make search results — and advertising — more relevant, although it has yet to fully explore this area. It now has three buckets of information about you: (1) your regular searches, (2) your Web surfing history, if you’ve turned that feature on, and your Google Desktop searches, and (3) your choices at iGoogle.
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About the Author, Matt Marshall
Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
