New Google Homepage GUI and Others I’d Like to See at punctuative! by Matt Winn

New Google Homepage GUI and Others I’d Like to See

Published by Matt January 23rd, 2007 in Media, Science and Tech

Google just introduced a new feature to their personalized homepage that enables a snapshot view of feed articles. One of my qualms with the all-inclusive homepages (e.g. netvives, pageflakes, goowy, etc.) has been the inability to get more than an article headline at a glance. In coaxing a colleague off My Yahoo!, I ran through the demonstrable alternatives which largely require separate homepage and feed reader apps. I’d love to see Google attempt a meld of their excellent services, but they’ve come one step closer today with the “+” button to the left of feed headlines on the homepage (see screenshot below):

A simple click generates a layered (i.e. not new page) abstract proffered by the content provider. Cool.

While we’re at it, I’ve got two other GUI-type requests for the technosphere:

1) Easy integration of a single hyperlink to multiple pages; in other words; I’d like to be able to hyperlink a single phrase and direct the link to multiple sites. The solution that comes readily to mind is a simple dhtml drop-down menu with a “primary” link set if one clicks on the phrase itself. We’ve all seen folks break a phrase into multiple hyperlinks to manage this process, but that’s not very SEO (search engine optimization) friendly.

2) Wiki-like editing tools within comment forms. Someone must have created a nice Wordpress plugin that does this but I haven’t dug it up and I’d like to see one get broad adoption.

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4 Responses to “New Google Homepage GUI and Others I’d Like to See”

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1 Ole Brandenburg Jan 23rd, 2007 at 9:15 pm

Pageflakes offers that feature since October 2006. Simply click on the edit link of a RSS feed module and select “show description”. I know it’s not the exact same feature but the end result is the same. Hope you like it.

Best regards
Ole Brandenburg
2 Matt Jan 24th, 2007 at 12:06 pm

Thanks for stopping by, Ole. I see that rolling over a headline pops up an abstract too - that’s probably most efficient. Any take on feed reader/homepage combos? Will we see attempts at merging the two with more robust feed solutions?

Best,
Matt
3 Ole Brandenburg Jan 24th, 2007 at 5:44 pm

Hi Matt,

that’s a tough question. I think only time will tell. The main challenge that I see is that mainstream users (quote: “What’s a feed?”) and tech savvy users have very different requirements and while I think that start pages and feed readers make a perfect fit, the majority of users might not think so. Really hard to say what’s right and what’s not.

Cheers
Ole
4 Adam Jan 25th, 2007 at 7:31 pm

Yourminis has also offered a similar feature for quite a while as well. Click on the edit drop-down and select “Edit Feed Settings.” From there, you can enable showing the description inline and pick how many lines you want it to display.