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Google Businesses The Internet

New Google Homepage Features 274

Posted by CmdrTaco from the so-many-submissions-about-this dept.
SecularG writes "It seems that Google has added new features to it's Personalized Home. To edit the content of your personalized homepage you click 'Add Content' in the top right, and a list of options slide out from the left. You can add your own bookmarks, select from more news feeds, and add your own RSS news feeds." Of course since Slashdot is already available from their default list of technology sites, why would you need the ability to include an RSS feed?
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New Google Homepage Features More

New Google Homepage Features

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  • Obviously... (Score:5, Funny)

    by grub ( 11606 ) <slashdot@grub.net> on Tuesday July 26, 2005 @09:00AM (#13164605) Homepage Journal

    Of course since Slashdot is already available from their default list of technology sites, why would you need the ability to include an RSS feed?

    It takes less bandwidth to see a dupe headline with RSS than it does when one reloads the entire slashdot mainpage. [rimshot]
    • It's also lagging quite a bit behind the RSS feed, I suspect...the 'top story' on the Google Portal Page is a little old [slashdot.org].

      note: the current story is this one right here [slashdot.org].

    • Re:Obviously... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Of course since Slashdot is already available from their default list of technology sites, why would you need the ability to include an RSS feed?

      Securityfocus, blogsites, infinite matter of the universe. I think being able to have your own home page with rss feeds is great!

    • Of course since Slashdot is already available from their default list of technology sites, why would you need the ability to include an RSS feed?

      It takes less bandwidth to see a dupe headline with RSS than it does when one reloads the entire slashdot mainpage. [rimshot]

      Because Slashdot has become a mirror for other sites, only 24-48 hours late?

    • Re:Obviously... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by mhearne ( 601124 )
      I use Linux, and supposedly I can make rss work, but I haven't been able to so far, and I don't really care that much.

      There is something I think you may have missed - You can search for your own entry (or enter a url) if it isn't in Google's stock list.

      Just click on "Create a Section" at the bottom of the sidebar, and you will get a search box.

      I have already used it to add "This Day in History".

      Michael

  • Countdown until Google.com looks like (Score:3, Insightful)

    by 55555 Manbabies! ( 861806 ) on Tuesday July 26, 2005 @09:01AM (#13164622)
    yahoo.com. What a pointless and crowded web portal.

    RSS eliminates the need for web portals entirely. You can just use the RSS functionality of Safari for a home page, or make a local page with the RSS feeds you want to see.

  • your other... (Score:2, Offtopic)

    by frieked ( 187664 )
    ...right. Seems like someone doesn't know their left from their right.


    • And once again, someone posting the parent story doesn't know it's from its.

      Anyone keeping count? (how many in a row is this?)

      I think if its were used in every parent story, they'd have a 98% chance of being correct. Rarely is it's actually used|needed.


  • Gmail (Score:2, Insightful)

    by daviq ( 888445 )
    So they are just adding more of gmail's features too their homepage.

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday July 26, 2005 @09:03AM (#13164640)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • sorry but your browser is not supported (Score:5, Informative)

    by pair-a-noyd ( 594371 ) on Tuesday July 26, 2005 @09:04AM (#13164648)
    Microsoft IE 5.5+ (download: Windows)
    - Netscape 7.1+ (download: Windows Mac Linux)
    - Mozilla 1.4+ (download: Windows Mac Linux)
    - Mozilla Firefox 0.8+ (download: Windows Mac Linux)
    - Safari 1.2.1+ (download: Mac)
    Many other browsers work with Gmail's basic HTML view, including:
    - Microsoft IE 4.0+
    - Netscape 4.07+
    - Opera 6.03+

    Konqueror users are still SOL

    • Re:sorry but your browser is not supported (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Oh no!
      Lynx users are SOL too!

      Seriously though, they did manage to make sure it works with 99.5% of all the web browsers currently out there. Nobody is forcing you to be that 0.5%.
    • Use Mozilla or Safari. It works fine.
    • I'm using konqueror 3.4.1 with default authentication and the site works very well. It's amazing what google can do with javascript!

  • A dud? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by rueger ( 210566 ) * on Tuesday July 26, 2005 @09:06AM (#13164665) Homepage
    Well, I played with it for five minutes and couldn't see much use. It wouldn't let me fine tune the news feed to suit my needs, or at least not in an obvious way, and didn't display the accompanying pictures from news stories.

    For whatever reason it won't display the weather for my location (Hamilton ON) [ec.gc.ca]. I don't particularly like the way it displays my g-mail info, and would like to change the arrangement and width of the blocks.

    All in all this one actually looks like a beta - dull, uninspired, and not fully realized.
    • Well, I played with it for five minutes and couldn't see much use.

      For someone that has *never* used an RSS feed I see a benefit: I don't need a program to see the RSS feeds as my browser goes straight to this page when it opens and I can see everything I need to see in one shot (except Slashdot which isn't up-to-date enough for me).

      Being that I don't know any better, with regards to how RSS feeds can be modified, I am quite happy with it. I can keep up w/my friends' RSS shit and I don't have to rememb

    • Re:A dud? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mboos ( 700155 ) on Tuesday July 26, 2005 @09:26AM (#13164815) Homepage
      I'm in Toronto, and I can get the weather. What irks me though is the fact that the temperatures default to Fahrenheit. The current temperature also has a Celcius value (but it's secondary) and all the long term forecasts are in Fahrenheit. There is no option to change everything to Celcius. I was only taught Celcius in school, and was led to believe that Fahrenheit was left on the thermometers to appease the old-timers.

      This is the 21st century, people! Let's start using those SI units that everybody* has agreed on.

      *The States not included

    • Weather (Score:2)

      by Len ( 89493 )
      Just use the weather for Ottawa, ON. It has the current temperature completely wrong, so it'll be just as useful in Hamilton as it is here. (And all but one of the numbers are in American units. Yay.)
    • dull, uninspired, and not fully realized
      Woah, for a second I thought I was on deviantart.com.
  • I go to the weather section, I remove "Happy, TX" and add my zipcode and blam, it doesn't add my city and keeps "Happy, TX".

    I go to the "news" section and increase the number of stories from 3 to 5 and, nope, it keeps 3.

    I go add a "gmail" section and it does nothing?

    Is this thing working at all? I can't seem to be able to save / configure anything.

  • Because... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by pickyouupatnine ( 901260 )
    "... Of course since Slashdot is already available from their default list of technology sites, why would you need the ability to include an RSS feed? ..." .. Because replies like this one make Slashdot useless from time to time, and sometimes its fun to read what other sites like The Register and The BBC have to say ;).

  • awesome (Score:2, Interesting)

    by fender_rock ( 824741 )
    awesome, now i dont even have to search on google for my torrents if i can add the rss feeds!
    too bad limewire doesnt have rss feeds for its files...

  • Not updated (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Tyrsenus ( 858934 )
    To bad when you add /. to your homepage the news links aren't updated real-time. This article doesn't even appear as of the time I'm writing this!

  • Slashdot feed (Score:5, Funny)

    by soboroff ( 91667 ) on Tuesday July 26, 2005 @09:17AM (#13164739)

    It's good to be reminded that Slashdot is a Technology, not a Lifestyle.

  • highly editorialized? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by supernova87a ( 532540 ) <kepler1@NoSpaM.hotmail.com> on Tuesday July 26, 2005 @09:24AM (#13164792)
    I'm not complaining about Google's choices of feeds on the personalized homepage, because I actually like what they've offered -- but I can see how someone else might be offended at their editorial judgment. For example, (at least in the previous version, maybe also this one) the news choices were NYT, BBC, and other (generally) reputable sources. Now they also have Washington Post and others.

    But I can see how someone might see this as liberal bias. "Where's my Washington Times, or Fox News feed??" And then some people will complain the other way -- "How come I can't get my Democracy Now feed on the home page??"

    Maybe I just take the position that I like their choices and to those who complain about not having their own right-wing news feeds available, I say, go and create your own Google, losers. On the other hand, is it dangerous for one company to filter the available options so dramatically? You don't have to use their homepage, but when one provider is so dominant, you can't avoid issues like that...

    ps. I believe the page now lets you input your own choice of xml feeds...
  • One feature I noticed on the new personalized Google site was that you can add your own RSS feed. Google should integrate this into their toolbar (like Yahoo's toolbar), in case some users aren't really sure how to find the RSS file associated with each website. Instead, the toolbar should recognize that an RSS feed is available and a button should appear stating something like "Add this RSS feed to Personal Google page".
  • Given GOOG [yahoo.com] stock is at all time high, my question is how does Google plan to make money with these free products?

    Google can not really commercialize this portal with the fear of getting sued [finfacts.com] by the news media.

    Or does it think that by giving away these freebies, it would attract more users to their search engine which seems to be the primary source of all their profits.

    Can anyone justify the price for google stock?
    • They're going to make money selling dossiers on us to corporations, governments, and the rich. Imagine what a politician could do with the Google searches of one of his enemies and all his family members. Will this somehow be avoided? I doubt it, but only time will tell.
    • The first time Google rolled out this home page, Google stated that they would eventually put ads on it. They already put ads all over Gmail based on the mail you receive, so it's only natural for them to put ads on your home page based on what you view.

      As for the stock price -- $300/share for a company that lives and dies by text ads? I'd wait for the correction.
  • ... if someone could write a firefox plugin to sync bookmarks to and from the google personal page. That way all my firefox instances will have a consistent set of bookmarks.

    Currently they have a plugin that syncs to an FTP server. This is cool but not everyone has a web-accessible ftp server handy. Everyone can, however, personalize their google account.

    -- /* no comment */

  • Wiki's (Score:3, Informative)

    by r2q2 ( 50527 ) <zitterbewegung@g[ ]l.com ['mai' in gap]> on Tuesday July 26, 2005 @09:43AM (#13164943) Homepage
    Some people have community based wiki's that they might want to be updated on for recent changes.

  • won't work with customize google ff extension (Score:5, Informative)

    by frieked ( 187664 ) on Tuesday July 26, 2005 @09:45AM (#13164954) Homepage Journal
    If you are running the customize google firefox extension these new features will work very poorly or not at all depending on what preferences you have set. Just an FYI for anyone having problems.

  • Ask Yahoo! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mlk ( 18543 ) <michael...lloyd. ... .org@@@gmail.com> on Tuesday July 26, 2005 @09:57AM (#13165083) Homepage Journal
    I love it. Ask Yahoo on Google.

  • I tried to add my del.icio.us bookmarks rss feed.
    didn't work for me. has anyone tried it?
    • I've tried it... doesn't work.

      It looks to me as if what Google is actually doing is letting us add RSS feeds from some sort of "approved list of feeds", rather than letting us add any feed we wish. If so, lame.
  • Who's going to enter URLs + bookmark names by hand?
    They should just let me import my bookmarks from elsewhere. For example, from Simpy, using its REST API:
    http://www.simpy.com/simpy/service/api/rest/ [simpy.com]
  • From what I can make out adding your own feeds requires a .rss or .xml extension and/or no query string.

    Otherwise the OK button does nudda.
  • MSN search has had rss feeds for all of it's search results [msn.com] (query: Slashdot) for ages. This is really neat because i'm currently subscribed to a few with Opera. This essentially means I can monitor new entries in MSN's index in (almost) realtime for such purposes as to:
    • Find out what my relatives are writing across the web (on forums for example) by using my surname (which is very uncommon)
    • Monitor the inclusion (not rank) of my webpages on the first 10 results on MSN (The feed only returns the first 10
  • The Slashdot editors need to print this out and tape it to their monitors: Bob the Angry Flower [angryflower.com]
  • MyWay.com [myway.com] already offers a much more customizable, ad-free homepage than Google which rivals Yahoo's. Unfortunately, only Yahoo has AFP news sections, plus a plethora of others that Google and MyWay do not have. The "most popular photos" are often amusing. If you haven't checked out Yahoo [yahoo.com] recently, do so, they made their UI pretty slick recently.

  • Start.com (Score:2, Interesting)

    by alienfluid ( 677872 )
    Any wanna give MS's beta start.com [start.com] a try? IMHO, it's much better in terms of usability, interface and aesthetics.
  • Of course since Slashdot is already available from their default list of technology sites, why would you need the ability to include an RSS feed?

    I just re-added Slashdot and will try them again. Last time I got temp banned for accessing their RSS feed too often. I guess that's what happens if you have Google Fusion as your start page. I hope Google has since updated their service so for each account accessing their page, Google don't *always* ask for the RSS feeds you subscribe to.

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