This depressing CNET article paints a picture of Google desperately and somewhat pathetically following in Yahoo!'s portal-making footsteps, but nine years behind. Truthfully, it has been a depressing few days for this Google observer, since the launch of the Fusion home-page personalization product last Thursday. I see it as a mortifying and inexplicable release for Google. Marissa Mayer, Google's VP for consumer products, is attempting to deny that Google is creating a portal; rather the alternate home page is "a good way to start your entree to the Web." Um…isn't that a portal?
Google the Follower
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(Page 1)2. I use a "portal." It currently consists of a Firefox window with Gmail in one tab, Kinja (an RSS aggregator) in another, my bank page in another, another window to refresh for news, etc etc.
Obviously there's some value in a centralized page of content relevant to me or you. And if it can keep itself smartly updated/refreshed a la Gmail's AJAX implementation, that'd be killer.
I have my own domain name and my own email there. Once I started using Gmail, I switched all my primary email usage to it...it works, it works great, and it makes me happy. Yahoo! Mail can't do that for me. What's always intrigued me about My Yahoo! is the calendar side of things, and the ability to view a calendar right alongside my web-based email, like I do in Outlook at work.
If Google's portal foray would ultimately result in Gmail alongside a Google calendar (have you seen Trumba? That even pulls in my Outlook calendar from my work desktop alongside a personal web-based calendar I can maintain separately) AND an RSS-aggregator that would allow me to see a snapshot of the freshest content from blogs I follow...that'd be perfection.
THAT's where I hope to see Google go.
Posted at 4:42AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Mark
1. I'm a little curious, what is so bad about portals?
Posted at 4:42AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Treymac