As everyone has already mentioned, Google just flipped the switch on what people are calling My Google. Jeremy Zawodny's commentary is particularly interesting, as is John Battelle's.
Over the past few weeks, I've written a few things about Google's search history. While some of this has been critical, I certainly praise and understand Google's interest in personalization. In fact, I laud them for entering the personalization game. This makes perfect sense -- if Google is to be a advertising platform without peer, then they need to know their users better. Having full access to an individual's email is good. Having access to their search history is better. Having access to all of the data on their hard drive is incredible. Knowing exactly where the user goes on the web is invaluable. And now, having the user explicitly tell you what they want to know more about is just the continuation of an advertiser's dream.
Let's face it. Google doesn't make money on search. They don't make money on email. They don't make money on building cool toys. They make money by selling your attention to other people. That's their entire business model, and it has made them worth 66 billion dollars.
By the way, $66B amounts to $846 for each one of Google's 78 million unique users. Or in other words, the market estimates you are worth $846 right now to the advertisers that are buying bits of you from Google. Which means that the advertisers think that can get more than that out of each of us. (If I ever find a good way of getting up-to-date unique visitors stats, a great Dashboard widget would compute that number on the fly...)
This is precisely why I think Google should enter the personalization game -- it's honest of them. My critique of their search history revolved around the fact that you can't really disable the tracking selectively. I.e., they don't offer a cookie-free version of Google, and that same cookie identifies you at Gmail, Groups, Web Search, etc. But if they are a portal, like Yahoo, then who cares if they track you? That's what a portal does. You know you are advertising fodder at a portal site. At least Yahoo doesn't masquerade as something it's not. And you choose to opt in or out of Yahoo with this knowledge in hand. Obviously I'm on a big transparency kick lately and this is just an extension of that reasoning.
Hmm. And I wonder why a search for "DeWitt Clinton" on Google suddenly dropped unto.net down to #170 from #1 a few months ago... It's still among the top results on MSN, Yahoo, and Ask, and it's popularity has been doubling every month or so. Ah well, perhaps it's better not to critique...