A Review of iGoogle

03/06/2008

With Google coming into more and more aspects of your web life, I thought I would show you another tool that came out of the Google Labs: iGoogle. A tool that is free for anyone to get, this could change the way you browse the web.

A Brief Overview

iGoogle is your own customized Google Home Page. This is Googles take on similar things such as My Yahoo! and the Microsoft Live personalized page. To get started, all you need is a Google account, and if you already have a Gmail account, you are set. From there, simply navigate to Google, select iGoogle, log in and you are good to go.

From here, you are provided with a default feature set that may or may not be useful to you. It gives you a basic selection of things such as your email, the weather, top news storys from google and cnn, movie times, and popular youtube links. While this may not seem like much, the real usefulness of iGoogle comes with the customization portion. Customization uses something called Gadgets, and they are extremly easy to use. Just choose the Gadget you want, select add, and it appears on your page. For those of you who don't like where the Gadget is put by default

Customizing iGoogle

There are literally thousands of customizations you can do for your iGoogle page. These customizations range from completely useless (well maybe not completely useless, you never know when you need an english to yoda speak converter) to tools that you will find yourself using every single day. For those who are not fans of the plain white google theme, there are hundreds of themes you can choose from to suit your personality. Some of them even change what they look like depending on the time of the day where you live!

There are thousands of Gadgets to choose from within iGoogle. There are nine categories of gadgets, ranging from news to games. Depending on how you use the web, you can use these gadgets to improve your internet experience. For those of you into games, you can add things like hang man, scrabble, even bejeweled. you can have it bring up the latest technology news, the current specials for your favorite online store, you can even create your own Gadget!

Getting The Most Out of iGoogle

There are lots of great features in iGoogle that you can choose from, depending on what you do on the internet and for a living, the Gadgets that work best for you may vary. I'm going to highlight a few that I find very useful. Note you can find any of these just by typing them in on the Gadget Search, I use their original name.

Gmail: This Gadget puts your Gmail account on your home page so that you don't always have to go in and check it. It automatically updates. so even if you just leave your home page up, it will show up with the new messages. For those of you who don't use Gmail, they also have similar Gadgets for Yahoo and Hotmail.

Bookmarks: Another incredibly useful tool. This allows you to access any bookmarks you enter in here from anywhere in the world. This is extremely useful because in addition to being worldwide accessable, it is also cross-browser, so you can access them no matter what web browser you are forced to use.

To-Do List: This is allows you to type out a list of things you need to do, and you can check a box to cross them off as you complete them. This comes in very handy when you need to have constant reminders of what you need to accomplish for the day.

Final Thoughts

There are tons of other ways you can customize iGoogle to suit your needs. Half the fun of this tool is figuring out what all you can do with it to make it the most useful and fun for you. This tool is incredibly useful if used right and can make your day a lot more efficient and your web experience a whole lot better. This is a tool I would highly recommend to anyone who does web browsing.

Rating: 4.5/5


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