This morning my brother pointed out that the Google IG page had a little drop-down menu next to the name of the tab. I took a look at it real quick, and didn’t see anything that looked special. It had the option to rename and delete tabs, which could previously be done anyways. One thing that I didn’t notice until a little later today was the new "Share this tab" option which lets you send the contents of an entire tab to a friend. I know for a fact that there was only the first two options in the menu before, so they must have just added the tab sharing.
What the friend receives in the email is a hyperlink to add your tab to their homepage. That hyperlink is nothing special, and only contains the information needed for the user to add the gadgets to their own Google IG page. When the user opens the link they will be taken to a page where they can pick and choose which gadgets are added to their homepage:
A new tab will be created and all of the selected gadgets will be placed on that page. When I gave it a shot it worked pretty nice, and kept all of the gadgets in the same order that I had them on my own page. Here is the URL that you need to view the gadgets on my homepage, and if you examine the contents of the URL you’ll easily see how it knows which modules are included and where they are positioned. The nice thing is that the links don’t contain any personal information, so even if I have the Gmail module on my page it doesn’t send anyone my account information.
Everyone that I’ve talked to has received this feature today, so I’m not sure if this is something that they are rolling out. Check your homepage and let us know if you’ve got it!
I’m switching to Google for my homepage now. You sold me. I’m a tough sell, too.
Yawn, My Yahoo! has long let you share modules, or the current page (tab).
Yawn, my personal home page is better than your personal home page, huh, netster?
And yes, my iG page now has the share feature.
You know, I love my Google homepage. But, my problem is that I forget to use it. It’s always been this way too. Prior to Google I used Yahoo for my personalized homepage and I spent time setting it up just the way I liked it, but same thing, I didn’t use it.
Wow, I must be pretty good…I wasn’t even trying to sell anyone on it.
Yeah, I normally wouldn’t have written about it but I thought the approach Google took on it was unique. Being able to provide URL’s to your friends is a pretty cool feature, and I don’t think other sites do it that way. I know Netvibes also has something similar, although theirs shares it with the public on their community page.