Customize your google news

You have to admit Google always steps faster than most of his competitors (you may say My Yahoo! and My MSN already have the same function. But they need user to register and sign in). Today, the gift he brings us is - customizing Google News. Now we can design our google news page and share with our friends. It provides a structure diagram of your google news page, which allows you to drag and trop the layer freely. At the same time, you can delete the one you are not interested in and add other section on it. The difference between 'Add a standard section' and 'Add a custom section' is that the former asks user to choose the section prepared such as 'World news' or 'UK news', the latter gives user opportunity to type the key words for searching the matching news. Here I try one by typing 'Apprentice Trump' as you can see.


The advantage of customized news page for me is that I can read news of different language in the same page now. For instance, if I'm interested in the entertainment news of HongKong, I can put the HongKone version in the page.

The disadvantage of the function is because Google doesn't ask user to login to use it, the configuration of layout only can be saved in Cookie, which means you can only see the customized page on the computer which you set. Once you delete Cookies in your computer or turn to use another one, you can't get the same page. However, Google allows you to share the customized news with your friends by providing a URL. You can save the URL for further use.


My temporal one is here. Although I don't access google news frequently (Bloglines is still my faviourite), the idea of customizing news are smart and useful for those who don't know RSS and never use it. It will be more brilliant if Google can combine it with Flickr, del.icio.us, or bloglines to help people make a personal information portal. This is another topic that I might talk about later.