So over break my friend introduced me to iGoogle. I didn’t really know what it was until I started using it, and now I’m spreading the word to anyone else who doesn’t know.
For the few of you who don’t, iGoogle is Google’s new way of slowly controlling your life. But this homepage comes with neat graphics and junk! For example, I chose a theme called “Tea Time” which shows a little Asian fox at the top of my page doing various activities depending on the time of day (at this very moment he is sitting on the dock watching paper boats in the pond). I have my page filled with stuff like my horoscope, daily reminders, a random art slideshow customized to use Google search to find images of the ocean, daily fitness tips, random “how to’s”, the weather, and most importantly, my top visited sites.
At this point I always have iGoogle open in one tab and navigate my entire internet life from there. I’ve become completely addicted to it. It’s sort of like using a social networking site in that I can personalize it to the extreme, but without having to deal with other people sending me invites to useless groups and things like that. Just when I thought that I couldn’t possibly streamline my internet experience any more, something like iGoogle appears and allows me to multi-task in such a way that makes my head spin.
Curious? Go ahead and check it out!
I think its interesting how the personalization inherent in things like social networking sites has started to flood over to other applications. In the days of Web 1.0, the extent of personalization was probably just an entered zip code to tell you the local weather; now, all sorts of personal options seem to have been enabled.