Ok, so I was about a week late announcing the goodness that is Backpack. But this is just so cool I couldn’t wait.

Google introduced a new homepage, something like My Yahoo, except that it doesn’t suck. I know that’s a subtle distinction for the Yahoo engineers sometimes – particularly the ones working on the homepage.

Take your normal Google homepage. Add custom content to the bottom that you choose. Make it fully drag-and-droppable via AJAX, which is incredible to see done well. Make sure the content is actually useful, that there are no ads, and that it integrates nicely with good sites, rather than the crap that Yahoo floods you with. Google gives you the power to flood yourself, if you like, but you can strip it down to nothing but a search box if you like. Another neat feature to note is that, at least for me, the site loads the search bar first, and the extra content in one block last. I’m not sure if this is a function of the browser, the site, or chaos theory, but it keeps it nice and speedy for a homepage.

It’s funny, because my project for the past few days has been trying to screen-scrape together a nice integrated homepage, and they went and did all the work for me…

[edit] One remaining minor annoyance was the hugeness of the Google logo on the personalized homepage. Greasemonkey has fixed that.