Introducing iGoogle

I blog to you today from Google, where the company is holding a workshop on personalization. The first speaker is Marissa Mayer, the company's VP of search products and user experience. (And, incidentally, one of our 50 Most Important People on the Web.)

She's talking about the history of personalization at Google, and explained that when the company was putting together the Google Personalized Home Page back in 2005, one of the working names had been iGoogle. But they decided to think of it as a feature rather than a product, and it rolled out with the intentionally mundane name of Google Personalized Home Page.

The "iGoogle" name lived on, however, in a way that nobody outside of Google understood--the Personalized page lived at the www.google.com/ig URL. (Some people, she's saying, thought the name of the page was Google iG.)

And here's the first news of the day: Ms. Mayer has told us that two years later, the Personalized Home Page is getting that snazzy name. They're announcing today that it'll be known as iGoogle.

Wonder what Steve Jobs will think of that trademark?

More news as it develops...