Why iGoogle has changed my life
I am slow to change. I like to convince myself that I am an early adopter however my role is more conservative. I watch the early adopters and make my decisions depending on the feedback I receive from them.
However, after watching and learning from some former co-workers I bought into the Google way of life. Now I watch the google blogs closely. I don’t wait for feedback anymore, I jump right in.
Google Maps API and iGoogle have changed my life. I really enjoy working with Google Maps. I think it is awesome how I can show some data with it’s geographical location (see Edufinder post). However, the focus of this post was meant for iGoogle
iGoogle allows me to centralize all of my needs. For me it’s become what opening the paper is for others. I have
- News
- CNN
- Wired
- Overall Top Stories
- Weather
- Frederick, MD
- Gorham, ME
- Google Reader
- All the cool web news I could EVER want, so numerous I can’t list
I must admit that my Google Reader is the focus of my iGoogle page, without it I would be visiting about 50 to 60 websites a day. Not all are web focused but 97% are. It seems that most of the quality content is web focused and that some of the other topics I enjoy are not to well published in this forum. That doesn’t keep me from looking though
iGoogle has changed my life. It has saved me time, it allows me to learn more in the time I do have, it teaches me information management, and allows me to spread my fingers over many more topics.
My news fix, my weather, my tap of my field, my everything. My iGoogle.
3 Responses
Jeff says:
I guess I should be a bit more specific. Google reader has changed my life, I use iGoogle to display my latest 5 reads. If you haven’t you really need to check out Google Reader, it’s similar but better than Opera’s feed reader. Searchable, taggable, sortable, sharable, and notificationable (I just invented that word) are all words that can describe Google Reader.
March 3rd, 2008 at 4:18 pm
Mike Ames says:
I love i-Google for a few reasons some of which were mentioned. Feeds is one reason in addition to some widgets, however my main use is for the financial aspect. I use Scottrade to invest a small amount of money outside of retirement funds and the one reason I use i-Google it to keep track of the securities I own as well as the securities I am interested in. I dont rely on this info but is sure in nice that I can get a good idea quickly without logging in to my brokerage account to get the streaming quotes. Since my browser is set to open to google I see an overview of my securities, weather, feeds, traffic, and email. I love it ! Since Jason is a fan of Netvibes I am forced to check it out since I am a groupie. An just kidding but I will check it out.
May 8th, 2008 at 9:33 pm
Jason Leveille says:
My aggregation tool of choice has to be netvibes. I’ve been using it for over a year now and find that it keeps me very organized. Like you, I have an obscene number of rss/atom feeds that I subscribe to. So, I’d have to say, without really knowing what I’m talking about (I don’t use iGoogle), that netvibes beats the pants off of iGoogle.
March 3rd, 2008 at 3:44 pm