I have been using the personalized version of Google called, iGoogle for about six months now. I really do enjoy the features available for my personalized home page but admittedly I have never really taken full advantage of iGoogle Gadgets. Now that it is 2008 and goals are all place, I plan on really beefing up my personalized home page to help me be more efficient with my Internet activities. I want to briefly show you a few examples on my personalized page. Keep in mind, I haven’t really even begun to scratch the surface here and my page is still very basic.
iGoogle Home Page Tabs
This feature is really nice. One thing I quickly noticed many months ago is that my main home page fills up pretty quickly. However, with having the tabs feature, I am able to organize my stuff and separate them into different tabs.
[click screen shot to view full size]
Once you add a new tab, you can name the tab what you want and fill it with the type of iGoogle Gadgets you want. The example below shows you how I quickly created a second tab and labeled it, “My Favorite Video Games”. Immediately after creating the new tab, I can click the “Add Stuff” link and proceed to search through hundreds of different iGoogle Gadgets. In this case, I searched for games.
[click screen shot to view full size]
With the ability to have different tabs, I can easily have a tab for my favorite RSS feeds, financial news, weather, etc… the sky is really the limit. The iGoogle Gadget page has tons of gadgets that you can add. You can search by category as shown in the screen shot below, or you can use the search bar. Doing a keyword search surprisingly returns quite a bit of stuff.
[click screen shot to view full size]
Adding a new gadget to your iGoogle personalized home page is very simple. All you have to do is find what you like and then click the “Add it Now” button directly below the gadget.
[click screen shot to view full size]
Before you add a new gadget to your personalized iGoogle home page, you can view user submitted comments. The comments are going to give you an opinion beforehand.
Want To Learn More About iGoogle?
You might want to learn more about this. If so then here are some references that will help you discover more about iGoogle.
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IGoogle
- http://searchengineland.com/070501-084656.php
- http://www.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=9002
What are your thoughts about iGoogle?
Do you think that this will be useful for you? If you already use iGoogle, what are some of the things that you enjoy most about it? What are some things that you wish Google would improve on? In what ways do you think using iGoogle could help you be more organized? I look forward to reading your comments.
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Date/Time: 1-3-2008 01:46:47 Comment #8299
Great write up of the features that iGoogle offers. There are also “premade” tabs like the Google UK financial one, and a bit more fun, the Stephen Colbert one
Date/Time: 1-3-2008 05:02:10 Comment #8307
I don’t use iGoogle, but I love Google Reader. Maybe I will have to give iGoogle a try.
Date/Time: 1-3-2008 10:27:09 Comment #8314
Pat,
I am not aware of the pre-made iGoogle tabs. Where do you find those? Stephen Colbert is a funny guy, indeed.
Fred,
I would have some fun with it and give it a try, it is pretty darn cool.
Date/Time: 1-3-2008 12:12:49 Comment #8319
-Garry, you should also try the automatic fill feature.
Create a tab and give it a name, the more descriptive the better…
…then just click the “I’m feeling lucky. Automatically add stuff based on the tab name.”, you can get some pretty cool results.
I have found some great widgets and sites by experimenting with it
Date/Time: 1-3-2008 12:19:37 Comment #8320
Ha that is great! Google sure did a good job with branding the “I’m feeling lucky” term. I will be sure to experiment with this and thank you for the added tip!
Date/Time: 1-3-2008 13:23:40 Comment #8323
Interesting that you bring up this post as I just really started to use igoogle myself to try to organize my own life. I now use the Calendar daily, as well as a to do list gadget among others.
It is a great tool, and the important thing with tools is learning how to use them properly to get the most you can out of them. Great post Garry.
Date/Time: 1-3-2008 13:30:58 Comment #8324
Thanks Cary, I am glad that you enjoyed the post. What all can you do with the calendar?
Date/Time: 1-4-2008 07:17:26 Comment #8397
Excellent article. I’ve got about 6 tabs now, and it is a bit too much really – it was supposed to be a productivity dashboard and now it’s more of a procrastinators for me! There are loads of great gadgets, but it can be difficult finding decent and useful ones. However, I love iGoogle so much I’ve started writing gadgets for it, and my blog is dedicated to it
Date/Time: 1-5-2008 22:51:30 Comment #8539
I like iGoogle. I figure since I use Google to search I might as well add some stuff that I use. Although I would recommend it for trying to add feeds. Use Google Reader for that.
Date/Time: 1-16-2008 13:58:06 Comment #9102
iGoogle is very useful if configured correct. I usually have only a few light-weight gadgets for each tab since I wanna minimize the page load.
Date/Time: 1-19-2008 07:24:48 Comment #9344
Thanks for the review and tips Garry – I’ve been using Google reader and find it really useful but I’ve never looked at iGoogle until now it’s looks really useful. Thanks for taken the time to do the writeup.
Jim
Date/Time: 4-6-2009 11:22:52 Comment #32843
Thanks!!
These tips is just what the doctor ordered.
T.T