Google takes on the world
As expected, Google has unveiled a beta of its Google home page that can be personalized -- a portal basically taking advantage of RSS -- directly taking on Yahoo's MyYahoo and Amazon's A9.com (see the CEO's interview here) and every other company that provides any of the information or services they already provide (email, news, blogs, weather, groups, answers, translation, social networking... the list goes on and on).
Of course, as Adam Penenberg writes in this Wired News story late last year, there's a reason why some of Google's services such as Google News (and Froogle that doesn't seem to work very well) are still in beta.
According to this San Jose Mercury News story:
The new personalized home page is part of larger strategy dubbed ``fusion'' that aims to fuse together Google's services with content on the Web, said Marissa Mayer, director of consumer Web products for Google.
``Our goal here was to give users tools to customize and organize their own information,'' Mayer said.
The changes to the home page are strictly optional; users need to log in with a Google account and visit the Google Labs Web page (http://labs. google.com) to activate the feature. They can switch back to the standard home page at any time by clicking on a ``Classic Home'' link.
Updated 9:23 AM