iGoogle allows users to personalize their Google Search homepage through the addition of RSS feeds, widgets and then organise them in tabs and themes. New apps have been created within iGoogle to allow greater social interaction.

An example of this new facility, as reported on TechCrunch, can be seen in the My Google Book Search Library widget. As the name implies, users can search for various books they are interested in and create their own digital library. Now, whenever a user with an open social profile accesses this gadget, they come across an option asking them if they want the gadget to “know who I am and access my profile”. They also have the option to “Post updates to my friends group”.

It is likely that this facility has been added in conjunction with Google Friend Connect, which Google has been trying to popularise recently, in order to access the user’s profile data.

Application developers working for Google have been working on new apps and social features for various iGoogle gadgets since April last year, which indicates that Google is serious about making iGoogle a social platform.

Developers can use the Google App Engine to write new web applications, which will continue to be based on GFS and Bigtable. The Engine will allow creation of scalable applications, that is, developers can first build their applications on a small scale and then expand them as they gain in popularity.

Each application built using the Google App Engine will be allotted a quota of 5 million free page views per month. Bandwidth, storage and CPU use will be free. It is expected that this capacity will increase in the near future, and its users will then be able to buy additional resources as per their requirements.

The App Engine from Google will compete wiith Amazon’s S3 service. According to the InsideGoogle blog, it may also compete with social networks such as Facebook since now anything that can be done on any social network will also be possible without using a social network.

According to some, Google’s App Engine may come to be viewed as one of Google’s most revolutionary products because it will be a web host that will be well configured, well connected and well tested without being phenomenally expensive. The preview will be available to the first 10,000 people who sign up for it and download the SDK. The product is still in its trial stages and further improvements will be made on it based on feedback received from its initial applications developers.

If the ease of use of Google’s Gadget builder is anything to go by, the App Engine may well change the way information gets organised and delivered to users in the future. However, it is one of the many Google products that will never be popular with the masses due to its technical nature and specific functionality.

appengine.google.com/

Previously, the iGoogle page included plain text RSS feeds and a few widgets. New features on the improved page include:

• YouTube Videos – recently featured videos from YouTube that can be played within the widget itself, plus a search box and a quick jump drop down menu allowing users to view top favourites, top rated, most viewed today, most discussed today and recently added videos.
• Google Map Search – shows a local map based on the user IP address and a search bar. Results of the local map search are shown on a map within the widget, without loading the full maps.google.co.uk page.
• Google News – top 4 headlines from World, UK, Business, Sci/Tech and Sports news currently featured on the Google News homepage. The widget includes a 6th tab that can be customised to pull any number of stories from other categories or based on any keywords entered.
• Wikipedia – unfortunately this is the only widget that opens a new page and does not show the Wikipedia search results or even a preview within the widget itself.
• To do list – simple organisation feature that allows entry of tasks to be done. Users can assign low, med or high priority to each task and just delete the task from the list when it is completed.

What made this experiment interesting was the fact that it was the first time Google has ever actually prevented users from searching before they took a desired action – creating their personalised homepage, in this case.

The screenshot below shows the new interface:

Users could not click out of the foreground and were not able to search without selecting some interests, a theme and clicking the “See your page” button.

This is truly unusual for Google, whose mantra is normally usability above all else. A lot of users who have personalised iGoogle but want to just perform a quick search will be unable to do so, the first time they access this page, without signing in or clicking another button. In other words, such users will be prompted to stay signed in at all times.

iGoogle’s new interface probably indicates a really strong push towards personalised search results and perhaps further changes to the algorithm with respect to the degree of results personalisation.

In fact, the search giant might probably end up making iGoogle the default page users see when they visit the Google homepage, and the “Classic Home” page will become the alternative choice, prompting most users to personalise over time.