Google rolled out a new way to personalize their home page. It's rather sweet. Like many portal pages, you can have different sections configured to show different things, and you can move them around.

For example, my new page include a feed showing new Gmail messages, my favorite six stock quotes, Wired News items, news from Google and BBC, and a word and quote of the day. Pretty slick.

My only gripe is that when clicking a Gmail message it opens in its own plain window, not in the normal Gmail interface. I've asked them to fix that and I'm confident they'll get right on it.

I understand from reading about the new personalizations that it will soon be possible to include RSS feeds that may even allow recently posted images from friends' web sites to appear on the page.

This kind of personalization has been available in other places for a long time, but those alternatives include blatant flashing ads and lack my favorite search interface at the top. I also understand that my new personalized home page is likely to contain ads in the future, but even so, probably not the worst kind.

For now, at least, I'll use it.