If you love something, set it free. Then, if you're lucky, maybe you can figure out a way to make money with it. Despite what appears to be a vocal minority that is unhappy with the changes, that's what Google may have finally been able to do with the redesign of its popular iGoogle start page.
Announced on the Official Google Blog, the new iGoogle start page features a major UI redesign that allows for both traditional, boxy widgets and a larger "canvas" mode that can take up the entire iGoogle pane. A key aspect of this change is a shift from iGoogle's previous horizontal tab navigation to a left-hand sidebar.
"The left navigation allows users to go from canvas view to canvas view of the new gadgets with one click," Jessica Ewing, Group Product Manager for iGoogle told Ars Technica. "We think is important as we see more and more great canvas view gadgets that require a scalable navigation model."
Regardless of the scalable UI advantages of the new iGoogle, some of its users arrived in the Google Groups forums right on schedule, voicing everything from despair to anger over the changes. Users are particularly unhappy over the left hand sidebar that arguably detracts space from the main area of gadgets.
"We're constantly thinking about how to improve our products for our users," Ewing continued. "We realize [the new sidebar] does take up some screen real estate, particularly on small monitors. One change we made was to narrow the left nav from the initial experiments. We'll continue to monitor user feedback and usage and adjust accordingly." Ewing wouldn't comment further on the broader reaction over iGoogle's new UI, but it's very likely that this is simply a negative reaction from a vocal minority over a very significant change for iGoogle and the start page in general.
and an ad to boot
Start pages are inherently useful because they act like a customizable dashboard for the web. Everything from to-do lists, to RSS snippets, to video players, to games can be organized side-by-side, but the intrinsically compact nature of start page widgets has made it difficult for service providers and widget developers to monetize their work. By introducing a dynamic UI that offers more spaces for applications to spread their legs, Google can finally entice developers with an opportunity to turn a buck from their widgets.
These larger spaces also introduce a lot more room for content and utility, making the start page even more functional for the end user. While the new widgets in Google's canvas-compatible showcase are few in numbers for now, they already reveal how much more productive iGoogle's platform can be. The new Gmail widget, for example, expands to reveal a full view of one's inbox (sans-ads, at least for now), complete with composing and reply abilities right from iGoogle. Google Reader is also now completely integrated, as are a few third-party widgets like those from The Wall Street Journal and New York Times, which both show ads in their full canvas layout of content.
Change can be scary, especially when it involves a company as large as Google messing up users' web-based desktops. But the new iGoogle may be exactly what the start page needed to take the next leap into becoming even more productive for both users and developers.
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