Many who use Google's Personalized Home Page feature - yours truly included - are trembling in fear today over the prospect of losing all of their carefully crafted settings to a bug that has Google engineers "frantic" to find a fix.
(Update: Service apparently restored for most.)
According to this story from the IDG News Service:
Angry users have lit up discussion boards on Thursday, complaining about the problem and expressing frustration at the possibility that they have lost the time they spent customizing their pages, while lamenting the hit on productivity the issue has caused them.
"I had four tabs stuffed with content on my personalized homepage. Dozens of RSS feeds, half a dozen bookmark gadgets, friends blogs, all my web presences, dozens of other gadgets. I spent weeks tailoring [it] so it was just right for my very intensive Internet needs," a user wrote on a Google discussion group. "Now it's all gone."
Another user's lament: "My web page is goooone ... nooooooo!"
However, the situation could be orders of magnitude worse: My own settings have remained intact.
Here's the official explanation from a Google blogger:
Yikes! So sorry about this everyone... but thanks so much for coming here to report it. We're now in frantic-chase-down-this-bug mode here at the Googleplex, and I hope to have more info for you soon.
For now, we're not entirely sure of this, but it's possible that changing your homepage theme might cause the problem. SO, if you still have your homepage intact, please avoid changing your theme until further notice.
The big question I know you'll all want answered is whether you'll get your homepage back once we sort things out... and the really honest answer is that I hope so, but I just don't know yet.
That's not going to sound all that encouraging to the fellow with the very intensive Internet needs.
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You are obviously an idiot.
You are obviously an idiot. If you think it is a major issue that you lost some or all of your homepage settings on Google's FREE and MOSTLY IN BETA service - especially when you had the option to back those settings up... then you are braindead and need a life.
There are a lot of
There are a lot of alternatives out there that provide the same functionality. I recommend checking out netvibes, they have a plugin to check gmail's email and a host of other features. Because they're a 3rd party you see competitors products on there. Flickr, myspace, etc. :P
www.netvibes.com
Also start.com isn't bad either. I believe it's where Microsoft does their ajax testing or something. It's very simple and very clean.
VizURL
I use Google Apps but have not been affected by this issue.
VizURL.com
I have a different way of organizing my favorite sites.
It is based on drag and drop logo images.
Backing up...
I use the personalized homepage as well. It's taken me a while to set everything up, and losing it would be unplesant if not terribly tragic. But I have at least a hundred subscriptions in the google reader applet.
Thankfully it allows you to export your subscriptions as an OPML file. Nice.
I started to get redirected to Belguim at the same time
My plain old google search page (google.com) started redirecting to Belgium (google.be and in Belgian) at this same exact time (early AM Pacific time).
After a LOT of digging, I find that their homepage address is automatically CHANGED based on what country THEY think your IP address resides in. But I've had this same STATIC IP address for over 5 years.
Just thought that may be what's happening to other people's settings -- they are now stored in another "country" instance of Google that they are no longer getting redirected to anymore.
I tried to get around this by creating my own Google homepage (nice and clean, after I deleted all the default "gorp"), but even after I hit the "save" button, it still automatically redirected me to google.be instead (and the setting were gone). I eventually found that http://www.google.com/ig will get me back to my "clean" homepage.
As a workaround, I changed my bookmark to point there, for now.
After a lot more searching, I finally found a way to submit a trouble ticket on this.
They say, "... we'll correct it within a few weeks if we're able to do so."
Service appears to be restored
At least in most corners of the globe:
http://www.networkworld.com/community/?q=node/14600
not mine
I'm still hoping for a restore