An informal LOHAD poll of Internet power users suggests to me that barely half of the people who more or less live online are using iGoogle. Among casual users, it’s undoubtedly far less.

I expect that to change in the coming year as people really get their hands dirty with iGoogle.

At first, iGoogle seems sorta like AOL’s home page — pick a visual theme and a general subject matter like business or entertainment and be done with it. But play with it for a while and the real power and utility of iGoogle reveals itself very quickly.

The core of iGoogle are the widgets you can drag and drop to create your customized home page. Mine includes a window into my Gmail, Google Reader and Google Docs, plus local weather and top news stories.

But iGoogle ups the ante with the ability to create tabs, so in no time you can have multiple customized thematic Google pages at your disposal.

Over in my “News” tab I have headlines from a half-dozen news sources plus business and financial headlines. I created my “Marketing” tab by allowing Google to pre-populate the page with widgets, and for the most part it did a great job, including Seth’s Blog and eMarketer, among others. I really like the “tech blogs” widget from LabPixies that gives an efficient look at headlines from Engadget, TechCrunch, Gizmodo and Slashdot. My “Fun Stuff” tab includes headlines from The Onion, the New York Times crossword puzzle, “This Day in History,” how stuff works and sudoku puzzles.

More than just fun and games, though, iGoogle is a great tool for helping me manage the information tsunami that comes my way daily. Play with it for a little while and I bet you find it at least as useful as it is entertaining, too.

Yep, useful. Which is why I suspect that long after the crosswords and sudoku puzzles are solved and gone, iGoogle will still be front and center in my browser.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 27th, 2007 at 6:00 am and is filed under Internet Stuff.