the blog

 
There's been some excitement over the weekend -- the kind of mass uproar that can only happen on the internet. 22 million people use a home page service provided by Google. But according to some of them, last Thursday Google decided to screw it all up. One angry user even created the image above as a protest, giving it the title "If you want to leave iGoogle, you have options."

Here's what started the uproar. Users suddenly discovered their home page was being cluttered up with a huge new column that Google had inserted without asking. Within days, I saw over 4,000 angry messages in the support forum for the site. And in the middle of the outcry, I saw one user repeating the same question: Is there any other option for a home page service on the internet?

Why, yes there is! :)

Xerpi lets users organize collections of favorite links -- I still love the colored boxes -- and customize the look of their page until it's just the way they want it. There's more sophisticated features too, but Xerpi's value proposition is really the elegant, clear, simplicity of the Xerpi home page, which makes it easy to maintain your personal collection of favorite web pages. Google's mistake was deciding that Google knew best how their users' home pages should look. Now they're discovering many angry users who disagree. As one blogger put it: "iGoogle has become TheirGoogle.

"It is not a personal home page if I can't control the layout."

But Google's not the only company that's learning lessons the hard way. Sunday Yahoo angered its users by suddenly turning all of their user profiles blank as part of a redesign. An upgrade Thursday to Flickr's "Recent Activity" page has already prompted over 3,700 critical comments. And last month after Facebook unveiled a new design, over 1 million members started begging them to return to their original layout, according to USA Today. One Facebook user has even launched a new group just to protest forced web page designs. (A technology analyst explained it this way to USA Today: "There is backlash to change, simple as that.")

It's been an interesting week. "Microsoft isn't the only software company accused of screwing up a user interface," one blogger wrote. But I think there's a larger problem: the way big web companies take their users for granted. "You can dismiss it," Yahoo's Tapan Bhatt tells the New York Times, "which is stupid. Or you can try to understand what it is that users are telegraphing." I think it's a lesson that Xerpi's learned already. As a new kid on the block, maybe Xerpi just has to listen to its users a little more carefully. After all, it's supposed to be a home page of your favorites -- not ours!