iGoogle Update is still Live (for some reason)

About two weeks ago I posted about iGoogle's update on the Mighty Interactive blog. At that time, I assumed the waste of space on the left side of the widgets was a mistake to be corrected later in the day. Two weeks later, of course, the mistake is still there. Which leads me to believe someone at Google thinks this change is a good idea. Unfortunately this flies in the face of... well, just about everyone who uses iGoogle. The idea of viewing the contents of some gadgets (Gmail, blog feeds, etc.) is good - and was the goal of the update. Moving what was a couple of tabs into their own column, however, crushes all of this information together. Even if you have a really large monitor and can still read what's in those columns, its a horrible waste of space. Personally, my greatest complaint is the rollout of an "improvement" that I cannot opt out of. Say what you will about Yahoo!'s update of their e-mail page, but you do have the ability to switch back to "classic" mode. Google, you will do what you want, of course. But do what I did, and count up the number of people complaining about your update vs. the number of people praising it. What I found were a lot more people asking, "does anyone know how to undo or get around this?"

About the Author: Eric Reid

I am the Social Media Services Manager for Off Madison Ave. I've been with the company since 2006, when I was hired to do SEO, and link building in particular. When social networking sites started cropping up, at first I started using them to create backlinks - but they weren't the best for that, given all of the "nofollow" attributes. However, I did see the potential for all of the direct referral traffic they represent. Since then I've been actively pursuing both tactics for clients: Links that can help them for search, and social postings that get them involved in the conversation. It's about the coolest job you could ever get. ;)

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3 comments so far

Karen Russell says:

I absolutely HATE the new iGoogle and have quit using it.--used to be my homepage. What a waste.

Maya says:

The only reason I still use igoogle is that I switched to Canadian version. The new igoogle is unusable, and Googlr the Great could find a minute and to answer the concerns. New igoogle is horrible.

Ryan Zuk says:

The left column is rather Outlook-ish now. I agree with you. It isn't an efficient use of space. A couple nice capabilities (actions) seem to have been added to the Gmail widget. Overall, I really like most of the applications Google provides, including iGoogle. This particular update thus far seems underwhelming. Perhaps it's a step towards something that will wow us.