Joe’s Apt.

Initial observations …

• I like that I can directly manipulate the location of each section via drag-and-drop. Nice touch! Haven’t yet looked under the hood to see what happens in a no-mouse scenario.

  Your user-agent-of-choice (alright, alright, your browser) may not play nice in terms of visual feedback while rearranging things. For instance, you may find yourself selecting other text as you move sections around. I suspect this can’t be helped from Google’s end (at least not yet).

  The cursor change (alerting that a section is movable) is welcome, as is a visual indicator of where your section-in-transit will end up before you commit. Well done!

• Here’s where it gets tricky. The customization panel corresponds to the News page itself: two columns of sections (not counting Top Stories). Meanwhile, these sections are summarized as one column in the sidebar, ordered by row, not by column.

  Now, if I drag an existing section (or even a custom one like “AT&T”) to the top of the left column, I shift the rest of that column downward, but - stay with me - remember, the sidebar’s news sections are ordered by row. This means I’ve just “shuffled” my sidebar list! That may (or may not) be what you intended. (It certainly wasn’t what I intended.)

  What I’d really like to do then is drop a section to the left of an existing one vs. above it. Taking it further, that ever-so-helpful visual indicator could appear not only above a section, but at left, right, or below it, affecting the direction everything else shifts. The danger of course is this could easily make things unnecessarily complex, depending on how it’s done. (Perhaps some paper prototyping and a/b testing a la Amazon.com can help out.)

• Defining a section’s keywords is very simple: all terms must match within a news item. Even so, I still find myself wanting a bit more flexibility when it comes to slicing and dicing my news. For example, what if I want to match on “CSS” or “Cascading Style Sheets” within a single section? (If there’s already a way to do this and I missed it, by all means speak up.)

All in all, customizations are a welcome enhancement to an already useful service. I’m sure the Google News team is already at work on the next iteration … if they’re not already on their way to SXSWi, that is.

As for me, I will not be able to attend (though I intend to next year). I look forward to reading reports from the field. (Someone shake Malcolm Gladwell’s hand for me and thank him, OK? Thanks.)