In an uphill battle to compete with extremely popular personalized homepages like Netvibes, Pageflakes and Wegwag, Google has expanded their own offering today. The recent trends of people keeping track of their favorite sites with syndication modules has led to these personalized homepages offering many tabs for people to organize their selected content. Previously, you were only allowed to have one page on google.com/ig.
This seems to be the only feature roll-out for Google’s Personalized Homepage today. Users can add all the same modules to their new tabs as well as name them whatever they like.
PaulStamatiou.com runs on the Thesis Theme for WordPress
Thesis is the search engine optimized WordPress theme of choice for serious online publishers. If you’re a blogger who doesn’t understand a lot of PHP, Thesis will give a ton of functionality without having to alter any code. For the advanced, Thesis has incredible customization possibilities via Thesis hooks.
With so many design options, you can use the template over and over and never have it look like the same site. The theme is robust and flexible enough not only to accommodate a site like PaulStamatiou.com, but also to enable the site to run far more efficiently than it ever has before.
I used the Scribe WordPress plugin and service to optimize this blog post for SEO.
{ 2 trackbacks }
{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
Ugh. Am I the only one who enjoyed the simplicity of Google’s Personalized Homepage? I mean, are there really people out there who are using so many modules they need more than one tab?
Personally, I only need about 9 or 10 modules, with several of them being regular things like weather. I have a newsreader for the other 200+ feeds…
Exactly! All I have is the GMail module, the local weather, some fun stuff like the Quote of the Day, and then a few of my favourite news sources. I have 14 modules, most of which I only glance at for a moment. I’m curious to know how many others are using.
Surely there is no need for tabs – did anyone ever use them on My Yahoo? Even if you’ve got three screens worth of modules, it’s much easier to scroll down than click on a tab; even easier with the mouse scroll wheel.
But I thought I would give it a go and I put the 10 or so modules I have into related groups and created a tab for each. Unfortunately they haven’t implemented this for the international sites yet so when I went back to Google UK, my modules were displayed in a completely random way. So, I’m putting them all back on one page now…
I was wondering about this… noticed it this morning but I haven’t read anything about it in my Bloglines yet. Well, except here.
I love the fact that they finally added tabs. I was sick of having to scroll farther down the page because of the fact that I have so many feeds. Now I can organize them in tabs (design,tech,etc.). Great feature from Google in my opinion. This was much needed………for me at least.
Tabbing is nice,but i guess it reminds me about K2 styles that we use with wordpress.Well i’ll try that out out and will post here some feedback.
personally, i use netvibes, which is much easier for reading RSS feeds without having to go to the website, it just loads right there in netvibes. Google’s personalized page is well behind the times.
The only real reason I can see tabs being useful is if the Google personalized home is your main feed reader. I have about 4 or 5 feeds on my google homepage which I only ever log into when I’m at work, that way I have just enough distraction to keep myself from going insane while sitting in a cubicle for 8 hours, but not enough to get me fired. Yin and Yang.
I see nothing wrong with the new tabs feature. If you don’t want to use them, then you don’t have to; they don’t take up much room. And for those that like to categorize, they’re there.
I searched “how to use Google tabs” into a Google search.
I still don’t know how to use them.
My computer also has Mozilla Firefox. 7.0. The old version generated tabs at the top of the page automatically and it was wonderful. I didn’t have to make them work.
Now this featuire has disappeared from My Firefox and I can’t make Google’s work.
Two steps backward for one step forward??
fred@fredmorathdirect.com
It was helpful to read about somebody who read up on a paticular issue and still didn’t know what to do next when he finished. Misery loves company. Right?