Internet Marketing 2.0

The Who What When and Where of Internet Marketing

Google themes and what it means.

April 19, 2007 at 7:37 am · Filed under Internet Marketing, Google, igoogle

Lunch

For those of you that do not use Google that much they have now started to allow users to personalize their personalized homepage even more. Yes you understood me correctly, personalize their already personalized homepage.

evening

If you already have a personalized Google home page you will see the link to themes right beside the add stuff link. Once there you have the option to pick from 6 different themes. The one pictured above is the Tea House theme which is based on my time zone. You see when you pick a them you insert your zip code so it knows what time of day it is in order to change the theme throughout the day. For instance with the Tea House theme, the little fox starts out by eating breakfast and then he moves on to his chores, lunch, etc. At night he is sleeping. Google has even added Easter eggs into themes. At exactly 3:14 am, the theme changes for just a minute to show a hidden version of the theme. Normally this is what the Tea House theme looks like most of the night but here is what happens at 3:14 am.

If you don’t want to stay up till 3:14 am email me and I can show you the eggs for the other themes. One of them has the Loch Ness Monster.

Now we get to the important part as to why they are going through all this trouble to make it enjoyable for us to use our personalized home page. First of all it is sticky. People enjoy watching the themes change. I forgot to mention that some of the themes change based on your weather outside. If it is raining outside the theme changes to rain. Now back to why. The most important reason. Remember that in order to get the themes to change you have to give them your zip code.

Let the tracking begin! Take it from someone that spent 7 years helping clients track online sales, referrals and traffic, this is more important to them than anything else. They are going to be able to build an impressive database of search patterns for any particular area in the world. You can do this already with ip’s and cookies but they are not as reliable and do not get the whole picture because of users not accepting cookies or those behind a particular network firewall hiding where their location is.

I would go as far as to predict you will be able to add a gadget that will allow you to connect with other users in your particular community without having to search for them. Making the home page even stickier and harder for you not to use.

You don’t realize they are doing all this behind the curtain by just allowing you to customize your theme but isn’t that the point.