Despite their slogan, "Don't be evil" Google is... well a bit creepy. Case in point, when googling for directions to a friends house, up popped a picture of their house, yard, and car in driveway... And that demonstrates both the usefulness of Google, and the creepiness factor. In order to find anything it must know everything, even if it takes its own Hydro-electric power plant to keep all those hard drives spinning...
But creepy or not I still use all their really neat and free stuff (like this blog site). And I'm including a heavy dose of iGoogle.
At it's most basic iGoogle is a way of customizing your search page by dropping gadgets all over it. Not at all dissimilar to Microsoft's Share Point, which I'll be going about in length (in future posts) for pure team oriented business goodness, iGoogle is instead tailored to the individual user. They also blended it with optional artwork which makes it really quite pretty as well.
For myself, since I use a number of different computers, having a home web page with all my links is a real time saver. I don't even bother with Explorer's favorites anymore. Beyond that I use it's RSS feeds to get headlines from news and blogs of interest to me, the sticky note pad is handy so I have a couple of those, I use the google mail gadget for my personal email address, and finally I organize it all by the tabs.... Home, Assorted, Projects, Information Systems, and Learning.
Granted, it means Google winds up knowing even more about me, but I figure if resistance really is futile you might as well aim for Jerri Ryan's collective.
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