01 May 2007

Google personalised homepage gets a revamp in the UK

It's a lesson that has taken Google a long time to learn - users like having things to play with.

The bare and extremely minimalist approach of the search engine's home URL intentionally has very little data on it; a difference of a few kilobytes of memory can make a massive difference when it is accessed hundreds of millions of times a day, so keeping it sparse is a good thing. However, this does not apply if you're trying to get users to spend as much time as possible on your site. Users as a whole tend to love tools that allow them to customise and personalise their settings - especially when they come for free.

Enter stage left the all-singing, all-dancing new Google personalised homepage, now available in the UK and Europe for googlemail.co.uk user accounts after being rolled out a month ago for .com accounts.










As well as the new homepage backgrounds - including a small fox in a boat who goes about his business through the day and a motley crew of misfits standing at a bus stop in the rain - the service has been rebranded iGoogle. This is due to the fact that the Google personalised homepage has been a wild success over the last year with over 10 million people signing up, although Google will not disclose the official figures.

The service also offers the addition of customisable gadgets, with no programming involved. Such gadgets involve a photo album which can rotate photos, a "Googlegram" greeting message, a "Daily Me" where you can describe what you're doing, a countdown function for days until a special event, a simple 'to do' or shopping list, an add function for YouTube videos and a freeform gadget where it is possible to add any images or text.

These new gadgets are a way of staying in touch with your friends via a new section of iGoogle called "My Community", which allows various Google users to keep in touch with each other via their Google accounts and provides an easy to use interface through which you can share all types of information.

These developments indicate how much Google has started to care about social search and online communities, especially after the wild success of sites such as Digg, Red.dit and Del.icio.us - and can only serve to increase Google's loyal user base even further.

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