iGoogle – Personalized Google Pages

I first came across iGoogle about a year ago (or a couple of years – one can never be too sure of time… or more than one for that matter).

Since it is my solemn duty to be the first to try out anything geeky and decide on its utility to others (that being a certain group of friends) I went ahead and created my personalized page without a second thought and …… and that was about that. After all, Google for me, till that time was a ‘search engine’… some place you would visit to locate information and find ‘links’ to useful sites with that information. (of course there was GMail – which not to mention .. is still beta for some wierd reason – but somehow that wasn’t ‘Google’ for me).

I added a flashy looking clock, a Quote of the day webpart and a couple of other useless ones.

No wonder I forgot about it at the end of the week, and never revisited MY google (which comes with a very inconvenient url www.google.com/ig, what happened to the good old fashioned ‘my.google.com’ ! :()

A couple of weeks ago.. I dont know what fluke of nature landed me back at my Google (I think I ended up going through the half million google offereings, most of which would never come out of beta testing – not to mention that these are still much better than many commercially available software for the same purpose). Once I ended up there, i started poking around left and right ….. and created a monster!

There is a serious condition (please someone let me know if they’ve come up with a very scientific name for it yet) that some of us have…. you just have to be everywhere at the same time, that means the half dozen IMs I mentioned in the previous post, you need to have access to ALL your emails simultaneously (and just in case – to reduce the probability of being left stranded in case your online email service provider discontinues free web based emails – btw, that actually happened with me back when I had a @usa.net account .. and the only web based email account at that – you need to have accounts on at least the following , Yahoo! , Hotmail   and GMail.

Hence the need for the Multi IM application and Outlook 2003 (with which you can obviously have your corporate and personal emails PoP-ing to the same location as well as add Hotmail inbox to the same PIM too!!!!). But, and here’s the catch…. you can’t always be lugging your personal computer/notebook with you. besides, its the Internet era (or whatever else it is being called these days) and you ought to be location free.

Enter Google – Lights, camera …. ACTION!

You can have ALL your emails, ALL your IMs, ALL your BLOGS and …YES .. ALL your COMICS on a single portal…by just following these simple steps:

1. just go to www.google.com/ig
2. (jes jes, sign in please)
3. Add a Tab to your personalized google Page….
4. Call it ‘Mail’ or ‘Chat’, depending upon whether Emails or IMs take higher priority with you.
5. Select the "Automatically add content" (or something similar) check box below the Tab name text box
6. ….
7. well yeah obviously, there’s nothing more to do here… press OK

If you managed to get that right, now you’re the proud owner of a Mail Portal at iGoogle which brings your Yahoo, MSN, Google and Outlook onto a single page.

You could do the same with your Yahoo, Msn, GTalk and AIM messaging accounts (add a tab by the name of "Chat") and your COmics.. and whatever else you can think of….

sigh…. its kinda late… i’m kinda sleepy…. and its not a weekend..