Recent issue of Fast Company has an article (“Google’s secret weapon”) about the product management of the google.com front page. Some take-aways:
- Managing a simple front page is not easy – especially when it is Google. Every biz unit or new project wants to get on the front page, it takes great decipline and solid metrics to maintain a simple and effective one.
- Once the page becomes cluttered (think MSN or Yahoo!), there’s no turning back. However, Yahoo! is “loosing” some weight recently by my observation.
- Less is not more, but enough is more.
As for web portal, maybe every website should support some level of syndication. Then in the next version of Firefox, people can assemble their own web portal – for example, mail from Yahoo, search from Google, news from MSN, etc in one page. This is different from the web-widget idea since no s/w programming is required.