You've probably become used to the animated ads that show up on web pages such as ours. If you build your own web site, or use MySpace (News Corp, NYSE: NWS), or Google's (NASDAQ: GOOG) iGoogle Home Page, or My AOL (Time Warner, NYSE: TWX), you may have grabbed some useful miniprograms that allow you to imbed a clock, a stock ticker, a weather report, or headlines from a variety of web sites and feeds. These mini-programs are called widgets, and they are the hottest topic on the 2007 internet marketing scene.

Widgets offer internet page builders a good deal, providing interesting content, updated frequently, to make the web page more appealing. In return, the web page host allows them to add a bit of advertising.

The upside for advertisers is that this allows them to spread their brand across millions of sites without paying for the placement. The downside for consumers is that widgets slow load times and clutter the content. The downside for sites dependent on advertising revenue (such as ours) is that when so many people are giving it away free, it's harder to sell advertising.

The most important aspect of widgets, though, is that they allow the user to create her own newspaper-like home page, with bricks containing the feeds she follows in the layout she prefers. No longer does she need to browse the web; instead, widgets bring the web to her.

Therefore, in a widget world, the most important turf is the visitor's home page. A Facebook user, for example, can load widgets in his page that bring his favorite content to him. No longer will those sites enjoy the ad revenue from his site visits, but are reduced to what they can pack into their widget.

In a widget world, Facebook, with over 30 million regular users and growing exponentially, could be the most valuable turf on the internet. If, as Tom Taulli speculates, it is about to go on the market, we could be looking at Google-like valuation at the time of its IPO.

Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) recently changed the "Google Personal Home" web page that greets millions of internet users every day to "iGoogle" as the company delves more into personalization. Okay, Google, it's official, you are now a complete internet portal.

What does that mean? See this for a detailed explanation. For years, Google has downplayed the fact that it is a "portal" while building all these personalized services for customers. No more.

This is significant because Google is taking the fight directly to competitor Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO). Google wants customers to get used to all the personalized and custom services Google can provide better (hopefully) than the competition. iGoogle features a few key differences from the former Google personal homepage, such as allowing customers make their own "gadgets". Umm, does this sound like the "gadgets" from Microsoft's (NASDAQ: MSFT) Windows Vista? Yep -- but Google is also letting users make their own "gadgets" in addition to using pre-defined ones like news headlines, weather, traffic, etc.

Google's personal start page was the company's fastest-growing product last year, which is probably why it's in focus right now. If these changes look like a direct attack on Yahoo!'s portal as well as Microsoft's Vista operating system, it's because they are. Google is low-key and sly when rolling out new products and enhancements, being careful not to directly describe them as competitors to hardly anything. It's amusing to hear Google execs call products like this "things that customers want" - because it is so true. These services and products are also taking on some established services and products from well-known companies. The re-launch of iGoogle further illustrates this point, does it not?