A couple of weeks ago, Google made some changes to their personalized homepage. When I initially saw it announced, I really didn’t pay much attention. “Whee, themes,” would pretty much sum up my first response.
Then I went on vacation and didn’t think about it for a week.
Well, it turns out themes are BSO’s (bright shiny objects) and as such, this did manage to finally catch my eye. In fact, I’ve switched from having Netvibes as my start page to the Google personalized page. Yep, I’m really that shallow — add some spiffy colors and graphics that change throughout the day and I’m hooked. I especially like the “Beach” theme.
The Google Reader gadget is slick. I also have gadgets going for Google Groups, Google Notebook, Google Bookmarks (see my Netvibes article (link above) for how I’m using these), Search History (more useful than I would’ve thought when trying to remember where I found something) and the translator.
Speaking of Google Notebook, it seems to have become much more useful since I had last looked at it. Probably a future article there.
I never did find an email gadget that I loved… by default, the Google personalization is tied to a Google account. In my case, that’s my free Gmail account. Well, that negates pulling emails from my “Google for my domain” email accounts, and I really don’t want to forward those to my Gmail one. For now I’m back to using the Firefox Gmail Manager extension. It just works.
Anyone else playing with this personalized page? I’m curious to hear more opinions!
Possibly Related posts:
March 31st, 2007 
Tags: 
[...] I’ve been using Google’s Personalized Pages more lately, a lot of my browsers are still set to Netvibes as the home page. While starting IE7 [...]