Today Google has launched six new personalized home page editions. These new pages are for readers in Finland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Ireland and New Zealand.

Google has included many great features including their gadget for the World Cup, which will allow football (soccer here in the states) fans to follow scores, standings and schedules for their favorite team.

All the other standard features you have come to expect from your personalized Google Home Page are featured as well including news, weather, GMail and your favorite RSS feeds.

On June 2nd the Google Official Blog announced the addition of a “Reply by chat” feature to the GMail interface. This will allow users to respond immediatly to an email via a chat window. The only proviso is that the sender must be online, of course.

Additionally, it will be possible to add the instant messaging conversations to the subject grouping threads that are created for its sent and recieved email.

The reply by chat interface utilizes Google’s IM Network, Google Talk.

Reply by chat

Doug Bowman, of Stopdesign, has signed on with Google with the goal of improving and standardizing the user interface across the Google empire.

The cat’s out of the bag. I made the announcement here in New Zealand at Webstock, so I’ll confirm that, yes, the rumors are not just rumors. After a bit of negotiation and a lot of internal debate, I recently accepted an offer to join Google as Visual Design Lead, a position that did not previously exist there. I’m charged with helping the company establish a common visual language across all their collaborative and communication products. This includes products I’ve already had some hand in like Blogger and Calendar. But it will also include other highly used products like Gmail, Writely, Page Creator, and other projects in the pipeline.

Doug is the designer behind the designs of many popular web sites including Blogger, Wired News, Capgemini, and Adaptive Path.

It sounds like we can expect a face lift at Google in the not so distant future.

About Douglas Bowman

Going to Google

We now have more Google services than we can shake a stick at.

Today, Google Notebook was launched. It seems to be another social networking site, a bit like Del.icio.us in fact.

The question many people are asking is how do we find all these services? Do we have to bookmark each one as they are rolled out? The answer is much simpler.

Go into your Gmail account and glance up to the top left corner. Three services are listed there including Gmail and Calendar. Click on “More” and the screen shown above will appear with a menu for all the services.

Simple, clear and effective.