The desktop was launched on July 25 and can be accessed at google.com/ig or by clicking on “Personalized Home” on the Google main site.

As reported by Google Blogoscoped, Google has released a very simple developer API to allow anyone to create and host modules that people can add to their Google homepage.

The API is available here. A module is an XML file and can be an extremely simple piece of code. Most of the modules have been created by Google employees at this point. The directory of available modules is here.

I’ve stated before that opening up the API and allowing third party modules is a great idea for just about every web 2.0 product, and ajax desktops are no exception. Microsoft did this with Live.com (directory is at microsoftgadgets.com), and has a ton of third party created widgets available.

Google’s home page has evolved significantly since July. In addition to news and RSS modules, users have the option of pulling in gmail links, weather, etc. It’s a useful application.

On a related note, Stephen Bryant has an excellent summary of the ajax desktops out there (although it is already dated with this Google API news).

Launched: July 25, 2005

What is it?

Google has added RSS and bookmark functionality to its personalized home page.

Bookmark functionality is very basic – it adds a link (with an optional title) to your Google home page. It will be more interesting if they add delicious or shadows-like functionality.

The RSS functionality works very much like Yahoo’s home page RSS reader, with cool options like setting the number of posts shown (up to 9), and the ability to drag and drop the feeds anywhere on the screen. It’s great for RSS newbies or if you have only a few feeds that you review daily.

Links:

Steve Rubel, RSS Weblog, Life on the Wicked Stage: Act 2, Error500, LockerGnome, John Battelle, Social Patterns

Technorati Tags: google, googlerss, rss, atom, yahoo, techcrunch, web2.0