fantomNews™ — the ultimate know

(rt) So Google’s launched their “personalized homepage” feature, studiously avoiding the term “portal” and christening it Fusion.

Which doesn’t seem to help one bit, however, because only an hour or two into the event everybody’s started to call it MyGoogle anyway (a pervasive trend which, of course, had been somewhat longer in coming), conveying the impression that the world’s purportedly most innovative company has turned into yet another hopeless Johnny Come Lately – pace Crayon and MyExcite and MyYahoo! and My MSN and …

Which arguably makes this venture the fastest backfiring branding attempt in search history. Well, we have long held and voiced the conviction that their current PR department is nothing but a disaster waiting to happen, and happen it does all the time …

Be that as it may, people across the board seem to be fairly underwhelmed. And seeing that they’re basically copycatting Yahoo!’s concept (which they were not below trashing only a few months back), we’ll wield the rod of poetic justice and let Yahoo!’s buzz blogger Jeremy Zawodny summarize it here ever so neatly (though we do wonder why he persistently seems to avoid the company’s trailing exclamation mark …):

Not only are they inching ever more down the slippery slope to portaldom, they’ve decided that we at Yahoo have really been on the right track all along!
[…]
There’s a radical idea! A customized home page with a search box at the top. Innovative! Whoever thought of the product is a world-class genius! What next, an IM client? Web hosting? A Calendar?
[…]
Fusion? Fuse? Damn, that sounds really familiar.

Where have I hear… Oh, right!

We’ve been talking about FUSE (Find, Use, Share, Expand) for months now.
[…]
Welcome to the content game, Google.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and some of us are quite flattered.

One suggestion for Marissa, if I may. Since it seems that you haven’t settled on a name for this “new” product, I’d like to suggest → My Google. We’ve found that the whole “my” thing works pretty well over here.

Source: → Imitation and the Slippery Slope of Portaldom: My Google

And he’s not alone in this assessment. View some other rarified criticisms here:

→ Google Blogoscoped: Google Personalized Homepage (Poll)
Just have a look at the poll results …

→ Wolf-Howl: Google Portal
A tongue-in-cheek appraisal culminating in advice of the ilk “Add in Adsense, Add in Adwords” – and we’ll bet the farm that they will listen …

→ The Search Engine Marketing Weblog: Google Personalization: The Early Reviews –

The product is painfully immature, even childish by industry standards, and on my mahcines does not work properly.

→ Techdirt: Google.. Yawn… Launches.. Yawn.. Personalized Google –

one of the first labs launches without the “Beta” moniker; perhaps the reason is that it’s not really that revolutionary. Sure, there’s drag & drop, but the functionality is severely limited.

Finally, here’s a very toned down review by Danny Sullivan, focusing on the features alone:
→ SearchEngineWatch: Google Launches Personalized Home Page

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