Thing Thirteen - Online Productivity

Hello,

I chose to use iGoogle as my homepage, mostly because I've used Google as my homepage for years now. It was pretty easy to setup, and it's convenient having this Blog, RSS reader and my favorite search engine all connected. Seeing how Google is my home page on my home PC, I setup the "iGoogle" feature available from google. It places your RSS feeds on the home page, as well as other widgets like local weather, the time and date, movie listings among other things, most importantly sudoku.

For the calendar aspect, naturally I chose Google calendar, staying with the theme of Google and one username and password for all their services. Setting up Google calendar initially was almost ridiculously easy, I just used the same username and password that I used for Blogger, GMail, and iGoogle. Also on my iGoogle start page I found a widget for Google calendar, which is a great addition to the iGoogle home page. I then created an account with the Try to remember the milk list site. A nice feature that offers is it's ability to integrate itself into Google calendar. Still, I don't really see a lot of use for it, if you're already using Google calendar. Also, I wasn't able to see the lists, when viewing Google calendar from my iGoogle home page. The Backpack site seems cool, especially if you don't already have any of the features it uses. If you do however have a calendar, or planner or to do list among other things, I don't see much of a need to switch over. Backpack does however offer more then just those features, so much so that it can actually seem a little intimidating with everything you can do. I went to Zamzar's site, which has a cool premise, converting one file type to another, which could be really useful anywhere. But, one of the most annoying flash ads/popup slowly slid across the screen in front of "Step 1" and I wasn't able to exit out of it, and I quickly left the site out of anger. The idea of easily being able to convert a file that library computers can read is definitely something that would prove useful.

In all, iGoogle is the one thing I might recommend to others. You can access your iGoogle page with your username and password from any computer, and depending how you customize it, gives you a quick glance at your calendar or weather or RSS feeds.