Google

Playing with Google

Have spent a little time playing with a couple of Google products which have changed since I last used them – both for the better. Firstly, Google Reader, which was rubbish before, and now is a lot better. As is probably obvious, it’s an online RSS aggregator, like BlogLines (only a bit worse). It’s had a pretty thorough makeover, all of which makes it quicker and more user friendly. It won’t become my regular feed reader (FeedDemon at home and BlogLines on the move) but I’ll keep an eye on it. It has another use though, which I mention below…

Reader

The other thing I played with was the personalised home page. You can now have more than one page of stuff, which is nice, not least because the range of things you can do now has increased. I have set mine to to have one page with my Gmail, Calendar, BBC News headlines, del.icio.us bookmarks, and some useful searches:

Googlepm1

Then a second page with some feeds that I regularly scan, along with a Google Reader summary of all my feeds, so I can quickly check what’s new.

Googlepm2

The third and last page has a few games on it that have become available. Plenty of oppotunities for wasted minutes there…

Googlepm3

I’ve added the personalised homepage to my FireFox startup pages – it’s pretty useful.

Note: I wrote this post, as I do all of mine these days, using the BlogJet editor. It automatically generated the thumbnails shown above, which is pretty cool, and makes my life easier…

Google Homepage Directory

Google have added a directory of possible services to their personal homepage, as announced on their official blog.

It provides a much wider variety of easy-to-add content than before, but doesn’t stop the homepage being a pretty static and dull affair compared to the likes of Protopage and Netvibes. You also have to be logged in to use it, meaning any searches you perform will be saved in the search history, which could be a little creepy.

Two Opinions on Google’s Page Creator

Google’s recent page creator has drawn some conflicting views. I’ll pluck two out here.

Scoble is broadly in favour:

I see a lot of bloggers saying “so” about Google’s new Web Page Creator. I think bloggers often miss the larger conversation that we should be having: the Office Live team tells me that 45% of small businesses don’t have a Web site at all.

Congrats to Google for trying to do something to bring more people onto the Web. That’s the conversation we should be having.

While Dave Winer states:

This evening Google launched a totally unremarkable page creator web app. It’s a nice Ajax text editor, with templates, but why isn’t it part of Blogger, or at least connected to Blogger, and where is the feed? The sites have no structure.

Where is the Mind of Google these days? Seems to be back in the mid-90s, re-discovering Geocities. Give me a ring when there’s at least some rudimentary content management in there.

I’m actually with Scoble on this one. I think a lot of the criticisms are missing the point. Some people don’t want a blog, they don’t want to update their sites on a daily basis. I think this is a good, easy to use solution for folk who just want to have a few photos up on the web, or a message to pass on to friends or family. Issues like CMS and RSS would mean nothing to these people, and nor should they.

In truth, the new Google service simply isn’t for people like Winer, or indeed Scoble. I myself can’t think of a reason why I would need to use it. But for the thousand’s of non tech-savvy web users out there, it could be really helpful.

Google Page Creator

Google has released another new service: this time a web page editor and host. Not really a competitor to it’s own Blogger service, this system just produces flat sites, so really it should be seen as belonging to the same breed as Yahoo!’s GeoCities (is it still called that?)

Anyway, I have been having a play, and it’s actually quite good. For those who have no problems ethically with using Google, and who have few web skills but nevertheless want a small personal web page, I would genuinely recommend it.

What Google really need to do is integrate this in some way with the Personalised Portal – so that people can have their Google Page with RSS feeds displayed too.

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