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I find this interesting as well as unimportant at the same time. Interesting because it shows that Google has responded to increasing connection speeds by addin
by ashray 14y ago
I find this interesting as well as unimportant at the same time. Interesting because it shows that Google has responded to increasing connection speeds by adding bells and whistles to their homepage. That's really great.
Unimportant because with Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc. - going to the google homepage is almost entirely optional. Google is working so hard into baking themselves into almost any facet of web functionality that their homepage is becoming less and less important over time.
The only reason I check the google homepage is to look at the doodles.
- jackfoxy 14y agoStrangely, Google is killing off the one thing that keeps me going to their sorta homepage, iGoogle. When they finally do kill it about a year from now, I'll have to come up with some substitute which may not be so Google-centric.
- mithras 14y agoYeah I don't understand why they do that, igoogle is pretty good and I use it alot.
- wilfra 14y agoI don't even know what igoogle is or does. User adoption is what drives features like this to remain, not how useful they are.
- MikeCampo 14y agoThat is true. This feature has been around for many years and used to be advertised on their navbar before Google+ came about, but it never stood out as a prominent component of the Google experience. I figure they are pushing people to adopt Google+ as their "portal" but I'm likely wrong as the two products are quite different. It could also be that it doesn't generate any revenue and the experiment is nearing the end of its life cycle.
- stumm 14y agohttp://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/04/alot-is-better-than-you-at-everything.html http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/04/alot-is-better...
- SEMW 14y agoI've switched from iGoogle to opera portal ( http://portal.opera.com/ http://portal.opera.com/ ), which is a pretty close equivalent (similar 3-column view etc). Only major loss is it has very few gadgets compared to iGoogle, it's mostly just for rss feeds. (And no, you don't need to use opera to use it).
- ashishb4u 14y ago..and to ping internet :)
- ashray 14y agoI replaced that long ago with 'ping 8.8.8.8'. Still google but not quite the homepage.
- philp 14y agoYou won't know if your DNS is down in that case :)
- riffraff 14y agowell, the DNS would be 8.8.8.8 anyway :)
- MichaelApproved 14y agoBut pinging it doesn't tell you if DNS service is up/down.
- TheGateKeeper 14y agoYou should be running your own in-house anyways.
- pud 14y agoGoogle has some kinda fancy browser caching, such that it's not a great way to test if your internet connection is working. Even with a shift-refresh.
- namanyayg 14y agoTotally agree to your point of view--Google is growing, then what's the problem if the code grows? It doesn't matter, what matters is that the load time is low.
- NatW 14y agoUnimportant? It's probably good for their SEO :).