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Google Personalized Homepage Gets A Real Name: iGoogle

Google has finally given its personalized homepage a name, calling it what many people had suspected the name was all along: iGoogle. Google had a whole Personalization Workshop in Mountain View yesterday, and Google Blogoscoped had someone on the scene for the whole thing.

Some details:

• The personalized homepage wasn’t ever supposed to have a name, it was just supposed to be a feature. The codename was “Mockingbird”.
• iGoogle was Google’s fastest growing product last year. See, Google has things that do succeed!
• There are 25,000 Google Gadgets.
• There are tens of millions of iGoogle users.
• 30% of users have adopted the homepage themes.
• Google has released a Gadget Maker, letting anyone make their own Gadget and share it with others. There are seven types of Gadgets it will let you create.
• The Photo Gadget lets you share photos with others. Create this Gadget and you can push out photos to whoever installs the Gadget. Photobloggers or just photographers can use this to push out their photos to subscribers.
• The GoogleGram Gadget lets you send out a greeting message every day.
• The Daily Me Gadget is Google’s answer to Twitter and Facebook status, letting others know what you are doing at any time. Your friends subscribe to your updates, and you let them know what’s up.
• The Personalized Countdown Gadget lets you count down to any event.
• The Personalized List Gadget lets you share a list, like a top ten list.
• The YouTube Video Favorites Gadget lets you create a YouTube channel and share videos with whoever installs it.
• The FreeForm Gadget lets you put any text and images in there, in any way that pleases you.

The new Gadgets are squarely aimed at the MySpace crowd (although they don’t work on MySpace), creating all sorts of cool boxes people will want to arrange around on their pages. In fact, I’d almost say that these things would go better on MySpace than on iGoogle, and Google should heavilly push Blogger and Google Pages users to adopt these. I want to install a few on this blog, especially if I can link the “Daily Me” to Twitter.

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May 1st, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | iGoogle, Products, General | 4 comments