Millions of Google users will wake this morning to a new Google experience. Not totally new if you have been using the "personalized home" version.
With this launch of the branding "iGoogle", the personalized version of the Google home page adds a number of new features to web users desktop utilities.
If you are an advertiser, I know you are asking WIFM?
Google continues to enhance the experience of internet users increasing their use of this incredibly pervasive medium. What that means is more eyes and fingers walking through the deep halls of the internet through Google, in search of things they would only a few years ago source or be influenced by through yellowpage directories, newspaper, magazines, radio, and television.
Through what I call "Thought Marketing" you can be in front of potential customers early in their research of a product or service. This by marketing your organization's offerings on the internet through search terms - especially odd search terms - that help people find you as they are discovering your industry and how they buy from it.
Call me for more information!
Rodney
P.S. Here's an article that explains Google's new "iGoogle"...
Google wants you to express yourself.
The search giant is renaming and adding new features to Google Personalised Home page, a product team said during a briefing with members of the media at the company headquarters in California on Monday.
In an effort to clarify Google's strategy on customisation, the company has changed the name of its Personalised Home product to iGoogle and launched new features. The personalisation product allows people to create a customised portal with news, blog postings and other interactive information modules called 'gadgets' for things like the local weather and -- the most popular -- the day and time. There are more than 25,000 gadgets that have been created.
iGoogle was the fastest growing product at the company last year, said Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience at Google. Personalisation is "one of the biggest advances we've made".
Among the enhancements, Google has launched a new Gadget Maker feature that will let people create their own gadgets with their own content, without having to know any code or HTML. There are seven templates of gadgets that people can create and share with others: Framed Photo for creating and updating photos; GoogleGram, an unfolding 'greeting card' gadget that shows different messages and images over 7 days; Daily Me, which lets people share snippets about their daily lives like a miniblog, such as how they are feeling or what they are thinking or doing; a YouTube gadget for a favourite video clip; Free Form, which is simply any text and image; Personal List, of things like favourite songs; and Countdown, for counting down days to events.
The company also is launching a new area on the Gadget directory called My Community that lets people share the gadgets they've created with anyone in their Gmail contacts list.
Google has expanded iGoogle globally to new languages and countries, reaching 26 languages and more than 40 countries, and has launched themes for iGoogle users located outside the US. "I think that themes will be an area in which we will continue to invest resources because they delight people," said iGoogle product manager Jessica Ewing. One concept the team is working on is creating themes that simulate specific artists. For instance, a French version of iGoogle could feature an image of brushstrokes from Monet's haystack paintings.
In addition, Google is launching location-based personalised search results so that users who have provided a default location in Google Maps will see results based on that location.
Earlier this month, Google launched Queryless Search, which lets people include on their toolbar a button that provides pages the system thinks the user might be interested in. Google also launched a 'recommendations' tab on the homepage that offers up searches, pages, groups and videos that might be of interest to the individual.
"I'm an eclectic person but everybody is," said Sep Kamvar, technical lead of personalisation. "We can't just go about designing products for the average person."
There are no ads on iGoogle now, but Mayer wouldn't make any promises about the future. "I think of gadgets themselves as a unique and neat form of personalised advertising," she said. "Like our text ads, they are more useful and more relevant."
Google is working to not only make it easy for people to create customised homepages with colourful and fun gadgets, but also to make it even easier to use Web search when trying to get to information, Mayer said. Eventually, say in 15 years' time, Google wants to know enough about you that you don't have to type in long keyword queries.
For example, "when you type things into the search box it basically augments your query", she said. "If I type 'broadway shows' into Google it would actually come back and understand that I like musicals and (prefer) peppy to sad… on the whole that's what we're really shooting for."