Vanity? All Hail Google

This one really shocked me with it’s cool-ness.

Google is now allowing you to choose the background image for their search engine. I swear, these guys really and truly “get it.” Go to http://www.Google.com now and you’ll see a new layout and a very small line of text which says –
“Curious about today’s homepage? Add your own background image now”

It’s super easy to do this and wow is that cool. I uploaded a pic of our family just now – 1:23 a.m. on the Right Coast – and when my family logs on tomorrow morning they’ll see their pic behind the expected Google logo. HOW COOL IS THIS !!?!!

Is it simple? Yes.

Am I a simpleton, perhaps. And as I write this it’s late and I may be overly tired and easily amused. But consider what this does. It really turns over a corporate home page to the users. I’ve never seen anything this easily wonderful on the web.

How can we all be this cool?

• Turn over your website to your customers
• Appeal to the natural vanity of your audience
• Simply find cool ways to keep changing
• Or, if all else fails, simply try to be somewhere near as cool as Google !

Unabashed Google Fan. Smart businessman.

If you’ve read this blog for more than a month, you know what a fan I am of Google. As simple as this new thing is, I’m totally blown away by how deceptively wonderful it is. They’ve had their fun thing with their logo changing every day based on whatever holiday or something unique that happened. Now, whammo, they hit us with something totally different. Keep in mind, these people spend money on this. They have folks whose job it is to make their homepage, their content, be cool. They probably have a department named something like “The Cool Department.” All companies should have a department that’s responsible for this.

We have short attention spans. Amaze us!

The day that nutty pac man game appeared on the Google search homepage it caught my attention. I have to admit, I had started to ignore the other thing they were doing of changing their logo every day or so. It was cute, but cute wasn’t cute any more. Change is important. In fact, it’s critical. Maybe we really are developing more “thin” attention spans as Nicholas Carr’s new book “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” says. But if that’s where we’re headed, you might consider getting on the train before it leaves the station. Give us what we crave – eye candy.

Ion Leap is good at creating eye candy for your website. We come from marketing backgrounds where our job was to stand out in the crowd. As Google has once again proven, that’s something of high value to today’s consumers.