Sometime last week, Google changed my personal page (www.google.com/ig) to it's new "experimental" system. And guess what? Amazingly it sucks. It's hard to fathom that Google can mess up anything. They seem to have a golden touch when it comes to the web.
But this thing is just awful.
I've been using Google's personal page as my RSS reader for probably two years now, and during that time, it's been virtually unchanged. Seeing that I was 'selected' for the experimental version got me excited. Google's 'experimental' stuff is usually leaps and bounds cooler than the regular stuff. But my excitement faded fast. What makes it worse is that I wasn't given a way to go back to the old one. I am stuck (or I thought I was...see below) with the new version. The problems with the new version:
To make matters worse, Google let it be know that the whole thing was a "controlled experiment" and was not giving people the ability to opt out ON PURPOSE!
I also found this gem. If you wan to go back and forth between the version follow the instructions below:
- Show quoted text -
> When you click on the address bar the entire text is selected, so when
> you paste something everything should be replaced with the new
> content.
> After going to iGoogle, paste:
> javascript:_dlsetp('v2=0');
It works.
But this thing is just awful.
I've been using Google's personal page as my RSS reader for probably two years now, and during that time, it's been virtually unchanged. Seeing that I was 'selected' for the experimental version got me excited. Google's 'experimental' stuff is usually leaps and bounds cooler than the regular stuff. But my excitement faded fast. What makes it worse is that I wasn't given a way to go back to the old one. I am stuck (or I thought I was...see below) with the new version. The problems with the new version:
- It's significantly more difficult to read anything. It's way too noisy. the font is smaller and now, instead of seeing just headlines, I'm seeing the first few lines of the story. That sounds like a good idea, but everything becomes a sea of words...even the headlines fade into the noise.
- I used to be able to move widgets around to other tabs. This no longer works. So one of the primary ways of organizing news articles is now gone.
To make matters worse, Google let it be know that the whole thing was a "controlled experiment" and was not giving people the ability to opt out ON PURPOSE!
I also found this gem. If you wan to go back and forth between the version follow the instructions below:
- Show quoted text -
> When you click on the address bar the entire text is selected, so when
> you paste something everything should be replaced with the new
> content.
> After going to iGoogle, paste:
> javascript:_dlsetp('v2=0');
It works.
1 comment:
Don't know if you know this or not, but iGoogle was just acquired by the Netflix new idea awesomeness team. The Giggle - I mean Google - apology is just days away.....
It's cutting edge Mountain Dew fueled creativity like this that makes the rise and return of CompuServe a real possibility.
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