The home-page personalization thing, part of a broader Google initiative called Fusion, is getting trendous, ubiquitous play in the 'sphere, as expected. I stand by my initial impression, which is a combination of bewilderment and distress. The product is painfully immature, even childish by industry standards, and on my mahcines does not work properly. (The personalization is not persistent unless Itype in a special "/ig" suffix to the google.com URL, and the "toggle" between the personalized and traditional pages described by Marissa Meyer is not a toggle at all, but a one-way switch away from the customized page.) And is RSS delivery really so hard to master that Google is struggling at this late date to provide it? You'd think they were developing a cure for cancer.

A couple of important early reviews are scornful, though one of them comes from a prominent Yahoo! employee. That's the most entertaining review entry to date, from Jeremy Zawodny's blog. "There's a radical idea! A customized home page with a search box at the top. Innovative!" TechDirt heaps abuse on Google's new portal product by putting yawns in its review title. Offering a bracing antidote to gloom, Google Blogoscoped is running a poll on the new service, and a whopping 92 percent of participants have responded favorably at the time of this post. SEW is running an objective survey of features.