Thing 1: Google goggles on...or off?

One of my favourite Google doodles to date: taking inspiration
from the great dancer, Martha Graham (seen 11th May 2011)

Being a longterm devotee of Gmail, I have had some experience with other Google products, such as Google docs and Blogger and have generally found them simple and satisfying to use - taking Gmail as an example, it blew Hotmail and Yahoo out of the water by keeping emails in conversations, by being far less prone to bugs and spam, and by allowing you to log in to other services without having 101 usernames and passwords. The way that it marks different correspondents in different colours also greatly appealed to my girly side.

Google's reputation for innovation and imagination (not to mention imperiousness and monopoly) is fearsome, yet one innovation that had not yet reached me was iGoogle. On my home computer I have my trusty favourites bar (and a subconscious order in which I visit each link) which mostly consists of Hermes, Gmail, Facebook and BBC Sport. These four sites must constitute around 95% of the sites I visit, and are generally the source of inspiration for the other 5%. For this reason, iGoogle appealed in that it would even minimise the four clicks it usually takes me to get around, and could well act as a new kind of segway into other sources of information.

The utterly pointless real age calculator.
That's not my real age, just to be clear...

I found the groundwork for iGoogle to be pretty easy (aside from the theme, which kept randomly changing on me), but I was somewhat underwhelmed by the result, as I gather many other 23Thingers have been. It is handy to have my lines of contact at a glance, but the rest of the stuff was lost on me, as I either wasn't interested in what happened to be showing at the time, or couldn't see enough of it for it to have an impact, so I ended up going on the parent site anyway. The proliferation of widgets was something else which put a dampener on it, as it seemed to be quite difficult to root out the quality from the slews of rubbish such as the "real age calculator" (put in your date of birth and we'll tell you how old you are...no, really...)

Grand Corps Malade: Roi du slam
français (photo: www.glenscolan.fr)

As iGoogle didn't really do it for me, I'm currently in the middle of taking a leaf out of Annie's book and trying something different - I'm also going for Netvibes, which, despite being a lot more complicated at face value, is already providing more for me in terms of widgets and feeds which fit my interests. I was greatly surprised at the number of hits for Slam poetry, something I'm returning to after first encountering it on my year abroad (sorry about the French link, but it describes the French slam scene better than the English link). Just wait 'til podcast week!

But until then, I'll get back to you on my Netvibe travails, as piles of cataloguing are eyeing me maliciously...