I'm Leaving iGoogle...wait not yet

The new iGoogle launched and I hate it. iGoogle is my homepage. I keep weather, stocks, mail, and feeds on there...mostly feeds. The new iGoogle destroyed it for me. The old one showed me post titles with a plus box to open up and read the item. This worked well. If I wanted, I could click-thru to the main site, but I rarely did. The new iGoogle chose to do away with the plus boxes and just give me the first two lines of the RSS items. This was terrible. It wasn't enough to read and it made the page an absolute mess of text that was impossible to read. Combine that with the worthless side bar links and I was ready to look for a replacement.

Well, I guess Google is feeling the heat. As of tonight, the plus boxes are back. I can collapse the side bar links and I'm mostly back to normal. I'll stay...for now.

As a temporary workaround, you can change your language preference to UK english and get the old design back. Who knows how long until they roll the new site to the UK version.

The software industry is excited about web apps because they can spin versions whenever they want. New features can launch when ready, not as part of a larger bundle. The problem with this is that it's usually a forced upgrade. With boxed software, I can choose to not have the Office ribbons, for example. With online software, beloved features are killed as the users scream in pain. Will web apps face a sustaining nightmare? Will customers demand old versions stick around forever?

The Google Gods Have Smiled On Me

Despite the silly name, I use iGoogle as my homepage. It was always annoyed me that it was so difficult to get to the other Google services from iGoogle. I had to keep gmail, calendar, and reader widgets around just for the easy link to the other services.

Google has finally fixed this. They now have a nice little link bar at the top of Google, just like you find in their other services. Thank you Google. You have made my day a little brighter.

Sea of Links

I'm loving Google's My Maps, but it is missing something. As the folks at work keep saying, you need to be able to save a link to maps that other people send you, and I agree. Google gives you links to recently viewed maps, but as far as I can tell, you can't save them.



Until Google gives us that feature, try this hack. Pick a random spot in the world. That will be your link drop. Then, just drop a placemarker for each map you want to save. Then in the description, set it to HTML mode and edit in your link to that map. You really don't need the marker on the map, but this will keep those map links within Google maps at least.

My Maps Impresses

Man, I love Google. They just keep giving us the good stuff. The latest is My Maps which lets you draw, annotate, link, and add multimedia to your Google Maps. The tools are simple but very powerful. I love this idea. I loved it when all of these folks built their own implementations use the Google Maps API. Unfortunately, I never loved it enough to muck around with those setups. Now, I don't have to. Google has made it dead easy.



To try it out, I made a map of the locations from my Photo Hunt that ran on this blog back in 2005. It was very easy and a lot of fun. You just click the map to drop a locator and then type your title and text. If you want to add links and photos, just switch to HTML mode and edit away. I found that the rendering will respect img attributes like align and height. You can use height to limit the rendering size of an image that might be a little large for the locator description. The only drawback is that you need your photos to already be online. They don't (yet) have an image upload feature like Blogger does.

These maps are really a lot of fun to make and they will be great for your friends and family to view too. I've written enough about geotagging in the past for you to know I'll be making maps of my vacations :)

Next up, I plan to map some of the cycling routes around town that I enjoy. My Maps is great! Thank you Google.

Google Themes Waste Pixels?

I use the custom Google homepage. It isn't the greatest thing ever, but it works well for me as a homepage with weather, RSS feeds, stock quotes, Gmail subjects, and of course, search.

I like the minimal style of Google, but when they added themes, I gave them a try. I'm using the cityscape theme, and I'm liking it.


We got in a discussion at work about how these themes waste your screen real estate. Some use more space than others. For me, I don't mind giving up the 56 pixels.

Google RSS Enhancements

I haven't seen any mention of this feature yet. When accessing my Google personalized homepage, my regular RSS headlines were enhanced with expanders to show the content behind the links. This brings the functionality more inline with dedicated RSS feed readers.

I took a screenshot and now the feature is gone again. Here you go.

Game for Google's Benefit

I stumbled on to Google Image Labeler (Beta of course) the other day. It's a service offered by Google that lets the users tag images with appropriate keywords. What do you get out of it? Well, you get to have a little fun, and perhaps better search results.

Google says you need...
Just an interest in helping Google improve the relevance of image search results for users like yourself.

Google is smart. They've arranged the tagger in a way that makes it feel like a game. You get a partner and a time limit. You score points based on tags that match.

The points are just there to motivate the folks doing the tagging. The clock is there to get you tagging as many as you can, and perhaps they are just aiming at general classifying tags, so they don't want you spending a lot of time. The partner is probably there to make sure you can't muck up their database with a bunch of bad tags. Your partner is random and it seems that you'd need two malicious users with the same malicious tags to inject bad data in the system. I think they've effectively prevented that.

Even though I don't get anything out of it, I've still gone back a few times to play. I wish you could get a few cents here and there. It would be much like Amazon's Mechanical Turk system where you get small amounts of money to apply your human brain to problems that are easy to us, but hard for a computer.

What's next for Google Games? Spot the Spam? Add the ads? Appointment juggling?

A9 - 7 + 1

Amazon, like Google seems to continue to fish for ways to make money. One bucket of bait went to their search engine attempt, a9.com. To me, their most unique and compelling feature was their instant rewards program. I know it made me use them (and save a bunch of money), but only enough to keep the discount active. I never did like the layout compared to Google. They gave it a year, but they are now dropping features like autumn leaves.

What's gone?

• Instant rewards


• Map service


• Diary


• History in the a9 toolbar


• Bookmarks in the a9 toolbar


• Toolbar


• Yellow pages

The announcement is up on the What's new page. I imagine this will change by the time you read this :) I've linked the services up above so that you can see they are dead.

They have added a nice feature to the regular search engine though. They now have continuous scroll on the search results. That means no more next>next>next>next> nonsense. I guess Windows Live gets the credit for that one. Ohh, and for the record, defaulting to including a book search pane is dumb. If I want to search Amazon, I'll go to Amazon and search. They do a much better job at presenting the relevant results in a useful manner.

I want competition to Google, but I don't see much that will make me switch.