Google has released its new personalized homepage service, binding together many of its popular services into a single portal page reminiscent of My Yahoo and so many others. While not technically a beta offering, there are only a few – albeit oft requested – content choices at this time: Gmail, Google News, Google Maps driving directions, local weather and a few select website feeds.

Having been a user of My Yahoo for a long time, I’ve been waiting to see a similar offering from Google for some time, since they seem to do every Just Right… and, given enough time, seem to bow to actual end-user requests – a rare trait coming out of Silicon Valley.

Unlike Yahoo’s offering and clones, Google innovates yet again through the use of some nifty DHTML that allows users to simply “drag and drop” each item, should they be dissatisfied with the default positioning.

Praise aside, the service needs some serious work before I’ll consider switching. My main gripe is the inability to add news items via outside RSS feeds. This is the number one reason to use a portal site like My Yahoo – you can save time by having your home page aggregate the headlines from your favorite sites for quick perusal. I would also like the ability to select which headlines from Google News are visible, not only the top stories.