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January 22, 2007
Google Personalized Home Update: please bring back the old one!
Google's Personalized Homepage just rolled out an update. With the new features, you can expand the contents of a feed item on the homepage itself, without leaving Google. An example of what this looks like is below:
I can't say I am a huge fan of this update. I have several feeds on my personalized home page -- maybe two tabs, each with 15 feeds. The large number of plus signs indicating that an item can be expanded adds a lot of unnecessary visual noise. The timestamp attached to each item is also mystifying. Even an honest to goodness RSS reader, like Google Reader does not feature them so prominently. On my Google Reader's expanded view, the timestamp appears in grayed out text on the top right of each item's enclosing rectangle. I appreciate why the timestamps were put in. Given the narrow rectangle allotted to each feed though, they do nothing more than add to the visual noise.
The personalized homepage from Windows Live presents expanded feed items much more tastefully than its competitor from Google. I understand Google may want to keep the personalized home close to its minimalist ethos--no Javascript, floating divs or fade-ins and fade-outs. Still, Google can learn a thing or two from how Live.com presents its wares. At the very minimum, I'd like the option to remove timestamps and expand buttons from my Google Homepage so as to reduce my informational and visual overload.
On a somewhat related point, real RSS readers or pretend ones like the Google Personalized Home make me feel awful by actually trying to be an Inbox For The Web (tm). RSS is not email. All the bolded folders with the counts of unread messages only serve to remind me how behind I am on my reading. I subscribe to many closely related feeds, which share a lot of duplicates among themselves. I may not even need to read the 45 items marked unread on the Slashdot feed because I may already have seen them on digg, Techdirt or Techmeme. I have no choice processing email; I must eventually process every single message that lands in my inbox. But RSS feeds are different; I subscribe to a feed because I want to pick and choose what I want to read from it, and not be constantly reminded how much of it I haven't read. Will some UI whiz please come up with an RSS reader with a fluid UI?
Posted by Vishy at January 22, 2007 11:12 PM