torek, 6. november 2007

iGoogle - or - How to organize myself!


I saw that Google also made an application that is even better than its Reader. It is called iGoogle – you can find it just blink away (on the right) from your Google Account name, like shown below.

(opikecagmail.com | iGoogle | Log out).

When you get in there, you can use the Calendar for your activities or you can see the date and the time, but you can also add some features – like games, news or blogs for instance …

In a few steps I will show you how to do it.

First you can choose how your Google Home will look like. On the right side of the page you have different kind of themes which you can use – like colours to paint a room.

A little bit higher you have a button ''Add staff'' and there you can add new features – like blogs, games, news or whatever you like. For blogs you have to just press the ''Add RSS feed'' on the left side in the middle of the page and then copy/paste the right URL, and you can have the selected blog ''in your home''.

The worst thing is you have to do everything manual - so blog by blog - but I think that in a month or two, there will be an option to import the RSS feeds from Reader directly into iGoogle.

If you are organized, because I am not, you can also make your home slightly more spaceful. You can do this in the main page with using button ''Add a tab'' on the left side of the page – doing that you can have news, games and blogs separated and organized in the way you like. The best thing is that you have everything you need in one place - date, time, calendar, email, blogs you visit, news you read ...

In the beginning of this year I read a book about Google in English (I had written about this also on my Slovenian blog - The Google Story, uaaa!). The way two people started this is incredible. I am not saying you have to use this stuff, what I am trying to say is that those people really know how to make simple sollutions that work and are easy to use. I think this is a good way to go, for them and for use. We use it every day ... it has to be in our brain that we search so much ;)

2 komentarja:

Saša pravi ...

I agree - iGoogle is nice. I've also set up mine awhile ago and use it as my IE and Mozilla home page. I've added various widgets I find useful and enjoy using it very much. It's a cool mashup site. Another similar site I like a lot is Pageflakes - has a really cool reader option, you can create many pages, make them public or not, also has a cool reader view... Lovely!

pikec85 pravi ...

I think it would be very nice to have that kind of tool right on the desktop, but an option of having it for the homepage is also very useful - thanks for the tip ;)