hello
yes this is my second post in a day. no i aint inspired from the blogcamp just that i've been customizing my google home since morning and here's how it looks now. it is lookin pretty fancy and ye it does its old job (search) too ;)
iGoogle has been here quite for a while. but it was only recently with the development of google gadgets that we can see it burst like never before. you can convert your google home into your personal portal for almost everything that you need is available in the form of gadgets. earlier google came up with the concept of gadgets for their google desktop product. (well actually AFAIK gadgets originated with apple's mac) gadgets are like small utility applications which one can use in day-to-day life. today google allows us to add these gadgets to your customized home page as well. In fact not only google but many leading portal containers have started offering Google Gadget Support. For eg: IBM's WebSphere, Apache's JetSpeed, Liferay all have come up with support for Google Gadgets in their portlet containers.
So basically you get all your utils handy with you on google page so you can add gadgets which give you stock updates, quotes of the day, word of the day, weather, gamse, wiki search even Bhagavad Gita. Also you can categorize these gadgets into multiple tabs. You can add your own tabs as per your requirement. Want more ... yes you can develope these on your own too. Although there will be some learning curve involved there. You can find more about Google gadget APIs here. You will need to learn some technicalities but once you know how to write these widgets, google will allow you to host them on their site. isn't it cool?
I agree couple of other portals have been already providing these things like personalization and stuff for longggggg time now for eg: Yahoo. But I feel this will be more effective as this will be more like community devlopment which has proved itself in many cases. And then it was interesting to see google turn (evolve) into a portal whereas Yahoo has alwasy been one. There's no denying that Yahoo has also started providing similar widgets thing but I beilive they are still only for desktop.They are quite cool as well but I wouldn't start on that now ;) and then no matter who gets who but as a user we will surely get to experience whole bunch of cool things.
well thats all on iGoogle.
iGoogle has been here quite for a while. but it was only recently with the development of google gadgets that we can see it burst like never before. you can convert your google home into your personal portal for almost everything that you need is available in the form of gadgets. earlier google came up with the concept of gadgets for their google desktop product. (well actually AFAIK gadgets originated with apple's mac) gadgets are like small utility applications which one can use in day-to-day life. today google allows us to add these gadgets to your customized home page as well. In fact not only google but many leading portal containers have started offering Google Gadget Support. For eg: IBM's WebSphere, Apache's JetSpeed, Liferay all have come up with support for Google Gadgets in their portlet containers.
So basically you get all your utils handy with you on google page so you can add gadgets which give you stock updates, quotes of the day, word of the day, weather, gamse, wiki search even Bhagavad Gita. Also you can categorize these gadgets into multiple tabs. You can add your own tabs as per your requirement. Want more ... yes you can develope these on your own too. Although there will be some learning curve involved there. You can find more about Google gadget APIs here. You will need to learn some technicalities but once you know how to write these widgets, google will allow you to host them on their site. isn't it cool?
I agree couple of other portals have been already providing these things like personalization and stuff for longggggg time now for eg: Yahoo. But I feel this will be more effective as this will be more like community devlopment which has proved itself in many cases. And then it was interesting to see google turn (evolve) into a portal whereas Yahoo has alwasy been one. There's no denying that Yahoo has also started providing similar widgets thing but I beilive they are still only for desktop.They are quite cool as well but I wouldn't start on that now ;) and then no matter who gets who but as a user we will surely get to experience whole bunch of cool things.
well thats all on iGoogle.
- signing off
ameyas7
ameyas7
Me - LinkedIn, R u? 
2 comments:
Before iGoogle, Microsoft had already lauched Windows Live Personalized Home page (www.live.com) which is absolutely the same thing. I think it's just the matter of extra-exuberant perception of anything that Google launches coupled with equally negative perception of Microsoft. (Surface was an exception - it did receive rave reviews.) In fact more that I think about it, Google hasn't been the first to launch many of it's offerings. (Including AdWords/AdSense). It's just their brand value that overly magnifies their accomplishments. However I must say that whatever they launch, works terrifically without any glitches.
i've explicitly written that many provided this already but it was more interesting to see google evolve. it was not supposed to be a portal whereas live/msn, yahoo were portal since ancient times.
and yes google may not have introduced all of their concepts but some were purely their own ideas like gmail, integratin mail + chat, desktop, earth to name few.
and more than that i feel i njoy the benefits rather than tracing the owner of the concept.
and at personal level i've always prefferred Yahoo mail over gmail (i bet u know that)
ive also mentioned that widgets originated with mac. yahoo also provides support for widgets but i doubt if they allow widgets in your webpage. so widgets + web = new thing
sometimes just putting 2 existing ideas can result into a new concept with higher utility. well i can write another blog on this but i'll leave this for now :p
chao
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