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Sunday, May 22, 2005 9:38 PM PT Posted by Harry McCracken
A Guided Tour of Google's Personalized Home Page
We've already written about Google's new personalizable, portal-like home page, which lets you add news from sources such as the New York Times, weather, stock quotes, and other custom information to Google's standard front page. This tweak to the long-unchanged Google home page is part of the company's new "Fusion" initiative to meld its various services in new ways, and it was the big announcement at the Google "Factory Tour" last week.I was about to chime in with my own mini-review based on a few days' use when I decided it would be more worthwhile to show it than explain it in words. See below for a mini-movie walkthrough of the new personalized home page feature narrated by yours truly, plus a look at how My Yahoo stacks up. (I'd ignored My Yahoo for a long time, and now I'm sorry I've neglected it--it's nicely done, and unquestionably a far richer resource than Google's customizable page is in its current form.)
When the Flash movie below finishes loading, press the play button at the bottom to get it rolling. (The bottom line? The Google page is slick and fun, but thin on content; stay tuned to see how it develops--or try out My Yahoo right now.)
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Incidentally, I created this animated walkthrough with TechSmith's excellent Camtasia Studio, a very powerful $299 tool for capturing and editing animated screenshots. Camtasia is one of the products behind "screencasting," an online medium popularized and named by Jon Udell of PC World's sister publication InfoWorld.
The above walkthrough is my second screencast...but I did my first one back in 1994 or so, long before the medium had a name, and even before PC World had a Web site. My 1994 mini-movie used Lotus's Screencam (a sort of granddaddy of Camtasia Studio), and it was available as a download from PC World's CompuServe forum. I've long since forgotten what it was about. The more things change...
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Now this is cool!
There's little value here until they launch the ability to add RSS feeds.
Love the guided tour. Please do more of these!
Thanks - great tour. I'm really surprised by how much I got out of watching such a short screencast.
Especially the introduction to My Yahoo, which is really a revelation. I'd also been ignoring My Yahoo, but will now have a good look.
This guided tour is wonderful! Will mail this out to family members that are always asking "How?" This makes it so simple! Will we see more of these?
Yahoo's got Google beat hands down. Yahoo's so far out ahead there's no real comparability.
Why go with the half-baked Google when Yahoo! has got it all worked out? It is too bad that everyone has rosey colored glasses on when talking about Google -- there are so many other better alternatives out there other than Google products.
Yes, yes, Yahoo's got the advantage, but mark my words and mak them well: Google is going to rule the world, just like purple tentacle.
Google HAS RSS FEEDS!!!!!!!!! Also, you can do almost everything MyYahoo lets you do on Google. Google ROCKS!!
Since this was first posted, personalized google home has drastically improved, and may be worth checking out now for some who previously used yahoo. The reason many people love google is because its products are clean, functional, and efficient, plain and simple.
Google is good!
visit:
http://vip.8n8.com.cn/vip_qq/vip2.htm?QQ=269269
خیلی خوبه، اما کاش دوستان فارسی زبان همت می کردند و مقالات فارسی بیشتری در دسترس عموم می گذاشتند.
Ask Jeeves is the best search engine!
Yahoo! can't catch up with Google, even touugh it got a head start.
Thanks! This is great. I was considering Google but thanks to you I realize that I a truly winning by staying with the far superior MY YAHOO! I think they have the "drop and drag" editing now!
Thanks! This is great. I was considering Google but thanks to you I realize that I a truly winning by staying with the far superior MY YAHOO! I think they have the "drop and drag" editing now!
Goole may need have a seperate user interface out of windows Internet Explorer.
Why?doesn't?google?have?a?webpage?design?like?Yahoo!?Yahoo?ROX
Google is an excellent company and usually makes solid products, I have never had a google product crash the UI is simple clean and effective, and thats more than I can say about Yahoo, sometimes simplicity beats out millions of features. Someone should fix the guy who posted the 0's I can't read the article very well because of it...