Google took another step yesterday in their personal evolution by offering an easy-to-use personalized homepage called Fusion for its users. The new service marks the latest offering in Google’s ever-expanding catalog of products to help users find information quickly and easily.
Google Continues Their Evolution
Editor’s Note: As a company, Google continues to evolve, offering new products and features almost daily. How do you compare what was Google to what the engine has become? Discuss at WebProWorld.
The new offering, similar to other personalized portal pages from Yahoo, MSN and others, is the next logical step for Google in their development. They feature news, email, weather, stocks, etc. This allows Googlites to put all their features into one simple website.
In all honesty, it is a portal website but it’s something that works well for Google’s direction. Critics have different things to say, some good some not so good. They will comment that this is a weak form of My Yahoo! and My MSN and in some ways they may be correct.
The other two have many more choices both for content and aesthetics and layout and to be honest this may be a weakness in this beta version of the product. Google did say other features like RSS would be added in the future. After all though, this is a new Google tool and Googlites should enjoy it and it should pick up some new users along the way.
Features include story feeds from the New York Times and the BBC. Google sets up a portal section to their GoogleNews feed for a variet of topics and interest as well. Also in the mix are movie listings, weather, and feeds from Slashdot and WiredNews for the tech side of things. One customization feature might allow Googlites to pull from the broad pool of newssources available in Google News. Murdok would look really keen on the personalized page. They could certainly add some more features like sports or other news features but with the link to Google News and being able to review some headlines, it could make the need for that minimal and perhaps other content could be added to give Googlites some other toys to play with.
Google’s Natural Selection
Google continues to offer a number of personalization oriented products in addition to things like AdSense and AdWords on the business side to help advance their logical evolution.
Google Fusion marks the latest in a variety of products the “Google Factory” has pumped out for its growing legions of Googlites. Google Labs has a lot of projects in various stages of development too. Some of these products include a Google Web Accelerator, Google Ride Finder, Google Maps and lot of others. Already existing products include the desktop search, Google news alerts and the Google glossary. Google’s evolution is a logical progression. When examining what they’ve developed and what they have in the oven, Google’s corporate philosophy of developing new features and technology for their customers, wherever they may be.
In the end, Google is a customer service company. They offer products and services for their customers geared around finding information quickly and advertising help for those who want their information to be found. Google’s personal evolution continues.
John Stith is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
