iGoogle

I try to have a life outside computers (see post below), which means that I frequently come across things which have been around a long time but just did not cross my path. iGoogle is one of those. iGoogle (formerly Google Personalized Homepage) lets you create a personalized homepage that contains a Google search box at the top, and your choice of any number of gadgets below. It's a big step away from the normally very spartan Google homepage. Gadgets come in lots of different forms and provide access to activities and information from all across the web. For instance, you can view your latest Gmail messages, read headlines from Google News and other news sources, display YouTube videos, store bookmarks for quick access to favourite sites from any computer. In other words, a portal just like Yahoo. Well, not quite like Yahoo - there are way more funky gadgets. Recently iGoogle released a "chat" box at the side of the home page that allows Gmail users to chat from their homepage without going to gmail.com, and a whole lot more "social gadgets" are about to be released, although the roll-out is in the US first and may take a while to get to this side of the world.