Google has re-branded its personalized homepage to iGoogle from the previous Google IG acronym. The announcement was made at the Personalization workshop that was held at Googleplex. Google has also recently re-branded Froogle to Google Product Search.
Jessica Ewing the product manager of Google Personalized Homepage product disclosed during the workshop that iGoogle is the amongst the fastest growing Google products and is now available in 40 countries and 26 languages, with more than 25,000 gadgets been developed for the personalized homepage till now.
Some additional gadgets released during the workshop are:
- Photo gadget that lets users share a series of photos with others
- GoogleGram gadget that allows users to display a new greeting message to someone for every day for 7 days
- Daily Me gadget which will show what you’re currently doing, as well as quotes, what’s on your mind etc. Think of it as Google’s punch at Twitter
- Personalized Countdown gadget
- Personalized List that lets users publish their top ten list.
- YouTube video favorites gadget that allows users to create a YouTube favorites channel to share.
- “Free Form� gadget that allows users to meld text and images in any way they want.
Google’s Personalized homepage is competing with Yahoo’s Personalized homepage and startups like Netvibes and Pageflakes. Its also an effort to glean more data about user preferences in a bid to serve them relevant search results and ads. The amount of information that Google has about its users is already scary, but Google continues to push the envelope with more offerings.
