Heard off the wire today about a new venture called iGoogle which will allow users to share their own writings, photos, lists and other creative efforts, as well as to give consumers personalized views of the Web through use of their geographical location and search history. This week, iGoogle personalized Web search will be available in 40 countries and 26 languages, up from 22 nations and 15 languages where personalization is now offered. Thought this was a great idea by Google just think they may be trying to ride the I name like Applies iPhone and iPod makes me wonder is Apple and Google are going to announce a partnership of some kind.

Posted by Catalin Patulea,Software Engineer

Some gadgets are simply better when you share them, and if you’re thinking of creating such a gadget, you’re in luck. By means of the Communication API, Google Desktop allows a gadget to exchange data with another instance of the same gadget on a friend’s computer. Through Google Talk, you can send and receive short strings (up to 2 kilobytes) of anything you want.

One of the great things about giving away Google Analytics for free is that you, our customer, get to select exactly the professional services you want. We don’t restrict you with (or ask you to pay for) a pre-determined one-size-fits-all professional services package. Instead, you customize your integration, analysis, and implementation package according to your needs. Some of you already have in-house expertise, some prefer a do-it-yourself model, and others prefer to work directly with one of our Google Analytics partners.

We’ll continue to support you with our free resources: the Analytics Online Help , the Analytics Discussion Group, built-in product help, Conversion University, as well as the occasional webinars, events, and blog entries. But if you need sophisticated hands-on professional services, it’s nice to know where to find them.

Whichever part of the world you do business in, whatever level of service you need, there’s a Google Analytics partner ready to help. We’re going to highlight some of our partners in upcoming blog posts, but if you’re used to using another enterprise level analytics package, you’re probably already familiar (and have perhaps worked with) some of our Google Analytics partners. Stay tuned for more.

Posted by Brett Crosby, Google Analytics Team

By Donal Mountain, User Experience team

As a user experience researcher on the Base team, it’s my job to really understand how you are using Base. I spend much of my time observing people who already use Base every day.

I do this research in order to learn as much as I can about people’s interactions with Base: what parts of the product do you particularly like or dislike? Which things are enjoyable, and which are cumbersome or downright confusing? I then take this information back to the rest of the Base team, so that we can be sure that we’re all working to make Base easy to use, with the features you really care about.

If you use Base regularly, you can probably list a few quirky things you’d like to see changed. If you’re new to Base, chances are there are some gray areas for you. Seeing things from the perspective of our users is often quite humbling — it reminds us of all the work we have yet to do.

Base really is a beta product, which means we’re continuing to make it as easy and rewarding to use as possible. If you have any particular insights, please contact me directly.

Custom Buttons are by far my favorite feature in the new Google Toolbar, which comes out of beta today. Clearly I’m not the only one, either — we have over 600 buttons in the gallery, with new buttons being added every day — and here are some some of my favorites, if you’d like to add them to your Toolbar. If you’re interested in making your own, it’s pretty easy. Just go to one of your favorite sites, right-click on the search box, and then click “Generate Custom Search.” You can find out how to add advanced features to your buttons here.

Those who follow the world of automated testing may be interested in the call for papers for our upcoming conference on the subject.

Word Verification For All

One of our most effective tools for preventing spam and automated abuse of Blogger is our word verification image.

Call for taxonomy leaders

A unique feature of Google Base is the ability to create custom attributes and item types. This gives you an opportunity to include relevant information, no matter how obscure, detailed or specialized it is, about the content you want to share.

May we suggest?

When we first launched the Google Talk blog, Mike, the product manager, had encouraged the support team to contribute posts as well.

What’s your vote?

Calling all football fans, from last weekend’s NFL draft, who do you think is the best player from the Top 5? Scroll down to Vote!

Beta believe it

If you’ve been hesitant to use Google Desktop 3 in your native language because of its “Beta” status, your wait is over.

A look inside Google AdSense

We’re happy to announce that, in addition to AdSense, AdWords, and Firefox with Google Toolbar, you can now refer your users to Google Pack and Picasa.

Google accused Microsoft of not playing fair in its quest for a bigger share of the $10 billion online advertising market on Monday and revealed that it has shared its concerns with antitrust regulators in the United States and Europe.

Google’s gripe: An upcoming release of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Web browser will contain a search box that in some cases defaults to the MSN search engine

If I were MSN I would offer the ability to choose the search box of your choice and also not put itself as the defualt search box.