Google

Google today announced the first major change to its understated homepage since its launch. Visitors to the site can now choose to personalize their Google page to create a Web portal uniting many of Google's different services. The traditional Google homepage is still available, now called Google Classic, and users can toggle between a personalized view and the classic search pane.

I'm not sure why this is such a shock since google news has been brewing for so long. Normally more competition is considered good for consumers, but I can see why both Yahoo and even MSN would be a bit uneasy about Google taking aim at more and more what they do. I mostly use Google but my view of Yahoo has changed in a positive direction over the last few years due to what seems to be a newer culture / attitude.

The options are pretty basic so far (especially compared to others like Yahoo!) but the one "cool" feature so far is the ability to drag and drop the content blocks on the fly to re-arrange the layout of the page. Yahoo can also dynamically re-arrange the layout but they choose to use an "edit" button where the user can decide from pre-defined choices on where they want the block moved to.

I will probably use it for a while since I use Gmail as my primary email client and the page lets me view my inbox but I am still going to stick with MyYahoo for the time being since I have more control over things like custom RSS feeds.

I noticed an article from ZDNet announcing that Google plans to double Gmail capacity--at least.. I was first a little leary since it is April 1st but then remembered that Gmail was announced last April 1st so Google appears to have a sense of humor.

Here are some screenshots from my Gmail account that shows that they are in fact bumping up the storage as we speak. Notice the total amount of storage available:

I guess what suprises me most is the fact that it is slowly building up to the 2GB capacity. Is this dynamically adding the available storage based on how much drive space is available to the system? Could they possibly be allocating this much storage for EVERY user instead of counting on the 80/20 theory where 80% of users use 20% of the resources while the other 20% use 80%??

Matt Haughey has some brief comments on the new Google Maps. Very cool stuff. He forgot to mention the coolest thing of all: drag-able navigation on the map. Just click and drag your mouse over the map in any direction to move the map to any area outside the viewable portion.

You can also click on Directions on the top of the page to get driving directions between two locations.