Google earlier this week rolled out a significant upgrade to iGoogle, its popular personalized home page/widget webtop. The "Canvas View" update has been praised but it's also been equally panned by lots of people. Lifehacker is running a poll that has 55% of readers giving it a Bronx Cheer while 45% like it.
I have mixed feelings about it. The left side tab does take up a lot of real estate on my screen, which isn't that wide. (I have a MacBook Air running 1280x800). Also the Gmail application is very buggy. Links don't work and the ability to use rich text formatting is now gone. Users are irate. These seem easily remedied.
It's also worth noting that Google has yet to activate the Open Social community features - which are stil in the developer sandbox. Once they do, iGoogle will by default become one of the biggest social networks in the world. Keep an eye out for that.
What iGoogle does have going for it though are full-screen widgets (which they still for some reason call gadgets). A lot of these are powered by and integrated with Google Reader. Here are three ways I am using it so far and I have noticed using PageAddict that my time spent with the site is rising significantly. This is something that will make page views extinct.
Subscribe to the Best of Friendfeed and Reshare Items with Your Followers
I love Friendfeed but it's a bit too hard for me to follow it the way I really would like to. So I subscribe to my personal "best" of day feed on my IGoogle page. What's great is that under the Canvas View feeds like these have the same features that Google Reader has. So, if I hit share at the bottom, I can easily re-syndicate these items back into Friendfeed. I wish I could add notes the way I can in Google Reader. Hopefully they will add that feature.
Use iGoogle as a Google Notebook Scratch Pad
During the day I need to take lots of notes. I am in the process of moving most of my computing to the cloud. The only desktop apps I still use are Office 2008, primarily PowerPoint and Entourage (Microsoft MacBU is an Edelman client). Everything else is in the cloud, including all my notes. All of my these get funneled into GMail eventually, but they often start in Google Notebook.
By adding the Google Notebook widget to iGoogle and maximizing it full screen, I have found it to be an awesome scratch pad for meeting notes. I can tag entries, export them later to Google Docs an then email these into GMail. Further, If I need to reference my Google Reader or Gmail, it's right there on the same page. In fact, I used it to start writing this blog post.
Add Google Suggest with iSuggest
I am addicted to Google Suggest. It's amazing way to discover searches that are relevant to yours. Google recenty added it to the main Google interface, but for some reason they forgot iGoogle. Add the iSuggest widget to iGoogle and minimize it and you'll enjoy the same functionality while waiting for Google engineering teams to become a bit more synchronized.
Next I am going to start exploring the Netvibes Universe for widgets that incorporate additional functionality, like adding Facebook to iGoogle.
