Google adds themes to personal home page

Caught this via Steve Rubel this morning. Google has added a theme engine to their Personalized Home Page offering that allows you to skin the page. I don't recall Google ever making it possible to move away from their standard white space look in any of their products before (with the obvious exception of Blogger). What's interesting is that a number of the skins ask for localization data and update the theme according to time of day or season. As Steve predicts, the marketing possibilities for a branded Google Home Page are an obvious move and I suspect he's right that we'll be seeing that in short order.

Given Google's bundling deal with Dell, for example, it's hard to imagine it will be very long before new Dell systems ship with a branded home page.