Personalized Home Pages goes iGoogle

By Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 01 May 2007 11:14

Your IT - Home IT

Google has renamed its Personalized Home Page Service as iGoogle, and added new features.

Themes that have been previously available to US users are now in all international versions of iGoogle, and the service has been localised for an additional 22 locales.

(It might be more convenient if www.igoogle.com redirected to iGoogle rather than the standard search page at www.google.com.)

While Google Gadgets - such as the clock and calendar that appear on the default iGoogle page - have been available for some time, creating them required a certain amount of skill. Google has now created a form-driven tool to build simple gadgets to display photos, YouTube videos, countdown timers, greetings and other items for display on the user's own iGoogle page or to share with others.

"[S]tarting today, without having any programming or web design experience at all, anyone can create Google Gadgets for iGoogle and send them to friends," wrote iGoogle software engineer Sophia Brueckner in the company's official blog.

"You can always make changes to your gadget, and you can even set some kinds of gadgets to update automatically so your friends will see a new message daily."

Unless users log into their Google accounts, they only see the default iGoogle page. When people are logged in, Google is able to use data stored about that person in an attempt to generate more relevant search results for them. In addition to previous searches, that information includes their geographical location (as optionally set in Google Maps), and perhaps the contents of their Gmail box.

While people might not worry too much about an automated process using this information, there is a risk that other parties including government agencies might seek access to it for purposes not envisaged by users.