A few nice updates to the Personalized Homepage this week for those who are feeling too lazy to customize it. If for instance you’re feeling lazy about browsing for new content to add to your homepage, there’s a new feature that will give you item-to-item recommendations. For my part, I have the Digg gadget on my page. If I click on the gadget’s drop-down menu and select “You might also like…” I’ll get a bunch of stuff that other people who like Digg also liked, including Slashdot, Wired News, Macworld, and more.

For those who are too lazy to create new tabs to organize stuff, here’s a bit of magic. If you add a new tab to your homepage, you can name your tab and have the option of letting us select the content for you based on your chosen name. Say I create a tab called “Astronomy” to get the latest news and info on that topic. We’ll populate the page with the NASA image of the day, the current moon phase, and a bunch of feeds related to astronomy. Less lazy folks are welcome to try to stump us with tab names.

And if you just don’t know what you want, we’ve added ratings and reviews to our directory, so you can see what other people have to say before committing to a new gadget.

Google is, by a country mile, the most popular search engine in the world. It’s popular because it seems to rank pages so accurately and quickly, time and time again. The secret to its success is its top secret Page Rank Algorithm. Google developed its page ranking system in an effort to increase the quality of search results and has left all of its competitors for dead. As a result, search engine optimization (SEO) gurus are always looking to find new ways to increase their Google rankings. As we all know, a website is a pretty nifty thing to have for a myriad of different reasons. But the truth is that it’s worth is derived from the people that surf it, and if no one is surfing it, then it becomes useless. So who’s the biggest website referrer? The answer is Google in almost every case.
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From the You-Know-When-Ajax-Has-Gone-Mainstream-Dept, Google announced today it will be offering businesses a premium service for its key productivity applications, at $50/user/year. The package includes:

• Access to office-style applications – Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Google Page Creator. No presentation package yet – perhaps Google should acquire S5 .
• Access to communication applications – GMail (@your-own-domain), Google Calendar, Google Talk (voice/IM).
• Access to Google Homepage (maybe corporations could deck this out to become their intranet homepage?)
• Control panel to manage the domain
• Ads can be turned off
• Storage at 10GB/user
• Integration with organisation’s sign-on and email infrastructure
• Phone support

The apps themselves are available to anyone, but the integration and extra services come with the premium service. Google provides this comparison table.

The giant elephant in this room is your company’s data sitting on Google’s servers. In the absence of an “Apps Appliance” sitting inside the firewall, there will always be a major proportion of the market unwilling to commit to a solution like this – increased risk of data loss, theft, and manipulation. Google’s pure-external model keeps things nice and simple, but it’s not for everyone.

Zoho, for example, offers “in-premise edition” to run inside an organization’s network. Similarly, Zimbra’s collaboration app. It’s also becoming possible to make your own stack, with apps like Wikicalc and the various wikis, though nothing as comprehensive as Google’s offering. It’s feasible MS will move their apps in that direction too.

The comparison among these approaches will be worth watching in coming months. For now, though, it’s great to see how much Ajax and the web has evolved in the past two years, with Google providing a lot of the inspiration. From TechCrunch: “Beyond competition and concerns, tonight is a good time to recognize the incredible force of innovation that Google is as well. Its nearly full-service suite of sophisticated, integrated online services is something of historic proportion.”