Google's fusion initiative...

So Google have finally announced what we've all known for sometime, that they are attempting to pull together all their disparate "products" under one roof in what they are describing as the "fusion initiative". A fancy name for what is basically making Google into a portal.

I suppose that it is good they are taking their time over this, but so far I am not impressed with the results. My problem is partly caused by their tactic of placing all new features into overly long Betas. I now have a GMail account, which I monitor through the Windows notifier and the Firefox plugin, depending on where I am. I can now also monitor this through their new "fusion" homepage, but only if I remember to go there. It doesn't help that I cannot seem to reset the Google Homepage button in the Google IE Toolbar to point to anything except the Google.com homepage.

When setting up my personlised Google homepage it didn't pick up any of my settings from my personlised Google News page that I set up the other week, very annoying. Finally, if I try to load my personlised Google homepage from the google.co.uk domain I get re-routed to the google.com domain. All very patchy.

In each case Google has launched something that I find incredibly useful, but I have to remember how to access each of these things. Perform the special mouse gesture while standing on one leg....okay, not quite that bad, but you get the idea.

I think the "fusion initiative" is fantastic and long overdue, and completely predictable. But they have their work cut out for them to pull back together all the different initiatives launched to date into one cohesive whole. I wish them luck.