iGoogle Homepage

By now I’m sure that a lot of people have had some experience with iGoogle, but I thought I’d write about it anyway, as it’s been one of the coolest tools I’ve used in a very long time.

If you haven’t had a chance to try iGoogle, I’ll try to explain it to you. The first thing you should know is that it adopted the crazy i-everything naming standard, which is kind of bandwagon-ish. It used to be known simply as the personalized homepage feature when it was first rolled out. That’s about the worst I can say about it, though – it’s crazy feature-rich and totally free, two of my favorite things. In order to get to it, you first have to log in to your Google account (you have a Google account, right?), and you will see an ‘iGoogle’ link in the upper right corner. Once you click on it, you’ll be taken to a page with a bunch of default widgets on it, which looks a lot like the ‘classic’ homepage with extra stuff below the search box.

Each iGoogle feature comes in the form of a widget that you add to the page. You can have multiple pages of widgets, in the form of tabs. There are a lot of custom widgets available, but you also have the option of creating widgets for things like RSS feeds. On the right hand side you’ll see a link that says ‘Add stuff’ that will take you to the widgets search directory. There, you can pick from any number of available widgets (from Google and from third parties), or if you want to add an RSS feed, just type the feed address in the search field and it figures out the rest for you (this feed is pretty good, to get you started).

No matter what your needs, there’s probably a widget for you. There’s a widget that shows your local forecast, there’s one that’s a mini Pacman game, there’s one that can track your Netfix queue, there’s one for Gmail – just browse through them, there’s so much to try out. On top of the widgets, there’s the option to theme your iGoogle homepage. The themes are also sensitive to your local time zone and seasons, which opens up a lot of fun little possibilities.

iGoogle is a great homepage, if you’re looking for something in that realm. I use mine to keep up with the latest news on the sites I visit the most – it’s a great alternative to standard RSS readers, with the upside that it can be so much more at the same time. Anther of the strengths of iGoogle is that anyone can extend it with their own widgets (which end up renedering down to html, so it’s not even really a huge learning curve to develop a widget either). There are a few gripes, but they are all pretty trivial. It doesn’t support all browsers perfectly, but I’ve yet to see too glaring an issue in that regard. I kind of wish it worked on pages other than the homepage too, like the Image Search home for instance, or that the theme carried over to search results. Either way, if you haven’t had a chance to check out iGoogle, you really should. You’ll never go back to the ‘classic’ Google again.