iGoogle

A few weeks ago somebody was demonstrating the power of iGoogle to me, and set up the account based on their interests, so today as I begin to create my own iGoogle account I'm not exactly starting from scratch. What I'll do instead in delete the gadgets they added and update it based on my own interests. Sky Sports? Not interested. BBC Weather? You get to stay.

As I clean up my iGoogle page, I am struck by 2 things. The first thing that I notice is how incredibly personalized it is. I've linked iGoogle to my personal gmail account, and I get a similar screen to my gmail home screen with a list of my fellow gmail contacts for chatting. I can also see when I've got a new email, and I can even read and send emails right from the iGoogle screen.

The second (slightly more annoying) thing I notice is how easy it is for my iGoogle page to become cluttered. They've made a good effort in the structure of the appearance with
different-sized boxes, but everything still gets bunched together onto one screen. I wonder if it's possible to filter gadgets by category.

Okay, so I've added eight gadgets and changed my display to a Ziggy comic. Here is what it looks like:


I really like the Ziggy display, how almost every time I reload the page I get a new comic. I also like the the news feeds and how when you click on the + you get a little blurb or each story. The particular gadgets of mine that do this are Unshelved, a comic strip about people working in a library, NPR, and LIS News.

It seems that iGoogle's purpose is to give a very brief overview of many different websites that you might frequent. It might work well as a homepage, and might have very practical uses in a smart phone (i.e. instead of having many different apps that you routinely check on your iphone, why not bring it into one app that puts everything you might be interested in into one central location, in an app), wait, I think Google's already thought of that.

P.S. I wonder if Apple has claimed intellectual property rights over putting 'i' in front of words (iPod, iPhone, iPad, etc.).