iGoogle: Google's newest brand

Google Blogoscoped has some excellent coverage of Google's Personalization Workshop that took place today at the Googleplex. The big news was about the Google Personalized Homepage -- which was hit with some serious server trouble last week.  The service will be rebranded as "iGoogle" as of 9:00PM tonight.

There were several announcements today -- all of which should go live in less than an hour.  Here is a quick rundown of what we can expect:

Personalized Location Results 

Google has launched location-based personalized search results. For those users who have provided a default location in Google Maps, Google will personalize results based on that location. For example, if a user has entered a default location into Google Maps and types in “library”, the results will bring up the user’s local library.

Gadget Maker Wizard

Users will be able to create their own gadgets without any programming knowledge.  There are several types of gadgets that users may want to create:

1. A Photo gadget (share a series of photos with others)
2. GoogleGram gadget (allowing you to display a new greeting message to someone for every day for 7 days)
3. Daily Me gadget (which will show what you’re currently doing, as well as quotes, what’s on your mind etc.)
4. Personalized Countdown gadget
5. A Personalized List (you can e.g. publish your own top ten list with this, Google says)
6. YouTube video favorites gadget (pictured above, this gadget will let you create a YouTube channel to share)
7. A “Free Form” gadget (an “all-purpose gadget that lets you meld text and image in any way,” Google says)

My Community

Tonight at 9pm Pacific Time, Google’s Jessica Ewing says they’ll be launching a “My Community” service as part of their personalized homepage directory. When you publish gadgets to the directory, they’ll ask for your location and name, and the location data will now be used for the “My Community” section to be more localized for your area. These gadgets will be able to be posted anywhere on the web, Google says, just like the gadgets which are currently available (and Google Desktop should be able to use these as well).

[via Google Blogoscoped]