Personalized Homepage coming for new hosting service
With all the excitement over Google Apps for Your Domain, I thought I'd take a quick look around to see if I could find anything interesting. I think I did — it appears Google will offer a customized Personalized Start Page (iGoogle) as part of this new service.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google has spent August assembling a hosted stack: it released Apps for Your Domain with email and Talk running on customers' own domains, and confirmed office-suite components due within days aimed at collaboration features Microsoft Office lacks. A day earlier, its Personalized Homepage had already been extended beyond the desktop browser via a January mobile rollout.
Now the Googling Google blog reports signs that a customized Personalized Start Page will ship as part of the hosting service itself — unconfirmed by Google, but consistent with the pattern of pushing personalization from consumer accounts onto organization-controlled domains. If accurate, it would give every hosted domain a branded, widget-ready front door rather than a bare inbox.
First-order effects
- Administrators signing up for Google Apps for Your Domain would get a customizable start page for their users alongside hosted Gmail and Talk, making the suite the default landing experience on their own domain rather than just a mail back-end.
Second-order effects
- Bundling the start page raises switching costs for hosted-domain customers and sharpens Google's positioning against Microsoft, whose Office collaboration gaps Google has openly targeted with this week's suite launches.
Third-order effects
- If personalization follows identity into hosted domains, the 'homepage' shifts from a portal consumers visit to infrastructure provisioned per organization — consolidating the web's front door around whoever hosts the logins.
The trend: Web personalization is moving from consumer accounts into hosted business domains, as Google assembles an applications suite built on identity, collaboration, and a customizable landing page.