Sue Waters

Yesterday I thought I had gone slightly crazy because suddenly my Google had an i and became iGoogle. Honestly to me you just can not do this! You just can not play with my Google logo (even if you own it) because I love my Google and have come to expect to see my Google everyday.

So are you seeing iGoogle? Well, you won’t be seeing it if you have not personalised your Google homepage! And if you have not personalised your homepage you are definitely missing out of lots of great benefits. Having a personalized homepage is a great way to place all of the information important to you on the Internet in one place – for example on my personalised Google homepage I have my deli.cio.us feed, my google reader feed, my gmail feed, News feed, world clock and more! And have also added a theme – which changes with the time of day.

So why the name change! Well Google wants to let us know that it is increasing its effort on personalisation. Google has added seven new templates that all you to make your own gadget and share it with your friends. For example you can easily create a gadget that you shares with your friends (which also changes everyday):

• a series of photos
• a gift which messages
• what you are up today

With the most popular widgets (called Gadgets by Google) being widgets that are easily created, shared (social) and are personal (it is your baby’s due date, your website or your blog, your videos, your playlist) then it would look like a good move by Google.

I strongly suggest that you check out the screencast tour of iGoogle by Molly McDonald (demogirl). It is an excellent video that shows you what being able to make your own gadgets means to you. Also shows the great benefits of having your own personalised Google homepage. After watching it I suggest you also read Google’s Personalization Push: iGoogle, Localization, Gadget Maker.

😦 Check out what my personalised Google Homepage looks like below (notice the iGoogle – click here to get the i in your Google while I don’t like (at the moment) having the i I cannot live without my personalised google homepage:

PS I know this is a me thing when it comes to my personal items. At work they removed my normal phone and replaced it with a VOIP phone. The new VOIP phone looks so different from the traditional phone that it took me a few months to accept the change (I kept insisting they give me a Garfield to improve the look of the phone!) I still have not received my free Garfield yet! Thanks Philip for sending me the news article altering me to reasons for iGoogle .