Move over MyYahoo make room for iGoogle

Let the branding wars continue.

In a move that proves that Apple does not exclusively own the prefix 'i', Google has officially renamed its personalized homepage service iGoogle. With Apple`s stranglehold on the `i` prefix finally broken by a major company like Google, will the floodgates now open? What's next iWindows, iSudoku, or how about a vacuum cleaner simply called iSuck?

If you've never played with Google's personalized home page, or iGoogle as it's now called, it allows you to create your own personal Google homepage by choosing “gadgets” to have instant access to information and other services that are of interest to you.

Personalization is nothing new, my.yahoo.com has been around for a while and I actually enjoyed it at first, but the email integration is flaky and unreliable and I felt like I was constantly re-authenticating myself even after a few minutes.

The new Google gadget templates include a photo gadget, a "GoogleGram" greeting card-style gadget, a YouTube video channel gadget and a Free Form gadget that can link text and images. A "Daily Me" gadget is similar to the increasingly popular Twitter, and will allow users to include daily quotes, brief descriptions of what they are doing at a certain time and other ideas that can be made available to all friends and family, Google said.

Google announced the rebranding of iGoogle and the new gadgets at the same time its executives detailed how the company plans to defend itself against Viacom's $1bn lawsuit against Google subsidiary YouTube. Google rejected claims that it enables copyright infringement on YouTube and noted that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act will be core to its defence.