Portalization Proceeds

A few years ago, I wrote a post called Portalization which showed a Yahoo homepage screenshot with certain services grayed-out, as an indicator of which corresponding tools Google offered. It was a look at how Google’s feature set had expanded with the (then-new) Gmail, and inspired some comments speculating about My Google, which later launched as Google Personalized Homepage.

A couple of years later, Google offers many more of the services that used to be Yahoo’s domain — and Steve Bryant’s independently come up with a mockup of a Yahoo-style Google homepage. I can’t decide if it’s brilliant or terrifying, but I do wonder what adoption of Google’s non-search services would look like if this design were adopted.