I’m sure you’ve all heard about it now, but Google is offering a personalizable home page as one of their “lab”:1 offerings. Not much really to write about it, since it’s basically a stripped-down version of Yahoo!’s My Yahoo!. However, I am sure that Google will be adding more modules to the offering to be competitive with My Yahoo!.

It will be interesting to see if Google rolls this feature out into a wider release in the future. This would probably push Yahoo! into offering more personalization on their home page as a result. Competition is a great thing.

Want examples of a lack of competition? How about the fact that IE (IE7 specifically) is *finally* going to offer “tabbed browsing”:2 — about two or three years late. I can guarantee that the only reason why Microsoft is releasing a version of IE before Longhorn ships is Firefox’s success. Without some competition in the browser market, Microsoft was fine with not improving IE.

So, who is going to be the winner in personalization? The user.

[2(IE7 will have tabs... about two years late)]http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/05/16/417732.aspx

[1(Google labs home page)]http://labs.google.com/