Monday, September 3, 2007

i Love iGoogle


iGoogle is a personalized page that allows you to pick from thousands of mini-applications (called gadgets) to set up your own personal homepage (I use Internet Explorer's tabbed browser and have several different homepages that open up all at once). Although there are others, such as Pageflakes, that offer similar customization, iGoogle offers more useful tools, especially for signing agents. My iGoogle homepage includes my local weather, sticky notes, local traffic, my Gmail and Hotmail inbox displayed directly on the page, bookmarks, driving directions, a mortgage calculator, a gas price tracker, and customized sports scores (Hey, a guy can't be ALL business). But my favorite is a small little application that allows you to instantly convert any document to a PDF file. iGoogle also has tabbed pages, so you can set up one page for business, one page for news and sports, one page for fun, etc.

And in what can only be described as completely useless but totally cool, you can select a page theme (I selected CityScape) and watch as the page changes based on the time of day and your local weather.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

all the widgets and features you described can be found on pageflakes too. i have my site customized with them, so of course i am biased... but reading your post made me think that there is actually nothing that pageflakes doesn't also have. plus you can publish your page or share it with colleagues too.

elaine

Alex Y. said...

I played around with both, but ulimately felt that iGoogle was the better choice. I could not find a PDF converter anywhere on Pageflakes, nor could I find a tool for driving directions(not just a map). And iGoogle is much easier to browse. But overall, both are terrific.