Time is money, right? The more efficiently you can complete your routine web tasks like email checking and feed reading, the more time you’d have to spend actually interacting with real people or getting down to business and making some money. Google now offers a way to simplify and thus, speed up your internet browsing time. It’s called iGoogle.
I recently discovered the greatness of iGoogle. I have a suspicion I am behind the curve on this one, but for those that don’t know, iGoogle is basically a customizable version of the Google home page. It allows you to change the look of Google’s home search page by adding your own theme, and more importantly, your own “Gadgets”! Gadgets are Google/User generated tools, snipits of info, news, games, and more that can be added to your Google home page.
Now that I think about it, I may have discovered iGoogle in it’s beta form a while back but didn’t find any of the gadgets to be useful. Maybe it’s because I’m a blogger now or maybe they’ve just added a ton more gadgets, but I now find iGoogle to be very useful.
You’ll see above that my iGoogle page maintains the normal search box up top, but I’ve added the following gadgets:
- Gmail and Google Reader – Before, I’d go to Gmail, then my Google Reader. Now I can see any updates from just one page.
- Yahoo! Mail – This is probably the best thing about iGoogle for me. I still have a personal email account with Yahoo! that I haven’t migrated to Gmail. It’s nice now to be able to view it from the same screen as my Gmail account.
- Site Meter Info – Allows me to quickly check traffic stats and see who’s linking my blog without going to sitemeter.com
- Date and Time – Just a simple clock and calendar for quick reminders.
The theme I chose is “City Scape”. The city actually changes with the time of day in my own time zone. Neat.
In the future I may add these gadgets which look like great time savers:
- iReminder 2.0 – Allows you to create simple reminders for any task.
- To-do List – Very simple to-do list that allows you to rank the list by importance.
You can also create your own gadget if one doesn’t fit your needs. Is anyone else using iGoogle or a similar page? If so, what are your favorite gadgets?
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