Google has renamed Personalized Homepage to iGoogle. I like it that it’s shorter but I have started to form a not so good opinion on anyone with a product with ‘i’ as a prefix anymore. And there is no dearth of such names in the market.. iHome line of products, iPlayer (soon to be launched) from BBC, etc. It just seems to me that everybody is trying to cash in on the Apple iPod’s name success! Or may be I am just tired of seeing names with that prefix.

While, Google doesn’t have to rely on Apple’s success when their name has actually become a ‘verb‘, I think they could have come up with something better. It’s not the first time though that they have made me wonder about the way they name their products. They recently renamed ‘Froogle’ to ‘Google Product Search‘. It looks like they are heading opposite directions in renaming these two products.. short to long vs long to short!

I am done with my ranting. Now, here is the post I meant to write to start with..

New Features

• iGoogle has been attractive to lot of people because of the availability of numerous gadgets. Now, you can make your own from a set of seven templates.
• A photo gadget, a YouTube gadget and a DailyMe gadget that is notoriously close to Twitter are a few new ones.
• Also, they are opening that themes that US folks have been enjoying lately to 22 new locales.

I love lot of Google products but iGoogle isn’t one of them. The reason for my lackluster review about iGoogle is because Netvibes and other personal homepage products like PageFlakes have all these features already and have implemented it better. The use of screen real estate is much better in Netvibes which means I can cram more feeds into every tab without having to scroll. Also, I like the ecosystem that has built around Netvibes and it’s very intuitive to build your page.

One of these days, I might have to write a post about Netvibes. If you would like me to hurry up and do that, do drop a line in the comments.

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