Well, as you can see from the excerpts from this eweek.com article below, the powers that be at Google insist that they’re doing something “new” with thier recent offering of a personalized Google home page. This type of rhetoric from the power pawns makes me cringe with disgust, like when you catch a girlfriend who’s cheated - who lies to you to ’save you the pain’. I HATE when that happens.

Adding arms to the Google vs. MSN vs. Yahoo battle, it seems that Google’s ‘new’ thing is just a few years late. What they’ve come up with in thier ‘released earlier than anticipated’ version is just lame. In fact, it made me go get a MyYahoo home page - really (I kinda like this RSS aggregator thing!). Unless Google can come up with a way to add some really CRAZY new features, there’ll be nothing new my friends - except for the order of the words in which they feed you the marketing crap that the machine that is Google was created to mine your personal websurfing habits - and thus personality - so they can pass the information onto the government to try to control your brain so they can oppress you into doing what they want and believing what they want you to believe. - but that’s just my opinion.

Here’s the excerpts:

Original Article

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.—Google announced its personalized home page option on Thursday and outlined plans to build aggregation of RSS feeds into it over the next two months.

News of the personalized home page first broke earlier in the day during a press event at Google’s campus here after presentation slides were accidentally leaked in a Webcast of the event.

With the move, Google is joining its top competitors in offering a way for individual users to create their own views into online services.

Both Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp.’s MSN offer personalized home pages and recently have expanded them to include outside sources by aggregating RSS feeds.

Among the ways Google is trying to differentiate its service from the offerings from Yahoo and MSN is by building the personalization on top of its existing home page. Once users personalize the page, which requires a Google log-in, they can toggle back to the standard Google home page by clicking a link.

Why was Google so eager to launch this without the RSS aggregator? - THAT’S WHAT A PERSONAL HOME PAGE IS MOSTLY ABOUT - AGGREGATING INFORMATION!!

Uh-oh… the All-Knowing Google knows something is up… - Is the end of the world coming??

Google originally had planned to launch the service on June 30 with the ability to add any RSS feed published on the Web, but axed that feature after moving up the first beta release, said Marissa Mayer, Google’s director of consumer Web products.

Google expects to add RSS aggregation in the next month or two and to include a set of default feeds in its setup wizard, Mayer said during a follow-up interview.

The company also is working on ways to let users more easily subscribe to feeds with Web site buttons and widgets that automate the process, while still letting users add subscriptions by entering the URL of feeds in the service’s setup options, she said.

And check out the code-name of the project: ‘Fusion’. Should be - “Wait and see what works for them, then copy it”.

The personalized home pages grew out of a larger project at Google called “Fusion,” which started last year as the company began releasing a bevy of new services. The home-page feature is just one of many personalization options Google expects to come out of the Fusion project.

“The aim was to fuse together Google functionality along with content on the Web in a unique way,” Mayer said.

And thus, the fuel gets added to the war-fire - the simple addition of the very volatile ‘Ghhhhhetoric’…

“…trying to do something new” he says! Bwaaa ha ha ha ha ha!!!! Somebody - point me to the bathroom before I piss myself laughing.

“WHAT’S NEW, ERIC?”

During the media event, Mayer and other Google executives faced repeated questions about how the personalized home-page move fits into the company’s intense competition with Yahoo and MSN.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that competition wasn’t the driving factor for the company and disputed the suggestion that the service was that similar to other personalized home-page offerings.

“The dynamic and internal planning is not about competing with existing offerings, but trying to do something new,” he said. “We won’t do something that’s just the same.”

And here’s the scoreboard for round 12488623495 of the Google vs. MSN vs. Yahoo battle:

Still, if its competitors are any example, Google’s personalized home pages also may help it draw more visitors to its online services. As far as the number of unique U.S. visitors to its site goes, Google trails Yahoo, MSN and America Online Inc., though it accounts for the largest share of search queries, according to data from ComScore Networks Inc.

But for Yahoo alone, its personalized My Yahoo service, the largest of its kind, drew 23 percent of Yahoo’s total unique site visitors in April, ComScore reported. Google may be anticipating similar results.

So, the final point in the matter is this: Is Google Evil?

In this case - hard to say… - unless you’d call copying your competitors evil? - or is it just plain lazy? (That’s a sin - isn’t it, which is evil - isn’t it?)

But it’s good we may finally see a ‘MyGoogle’ homepage - with RSS feeds and all!

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 7th, 2005 at 11:28 pm and is filed under Google the Good, Google the Bad, Google Labs: 'New Stuff'.