Google Homepage / Notebook
Google Personalized Homepage and Google Notebook are no news, but many people don't seem to know much about, and both services are surprisingly useful. Here's why...
Google Personalized Homepage
Google Personalized Homepage is a portal site app where you can add and remove components (or so called Google Gadgets) as you see fit. You can have your news, stock ticker and so forth all on one page. If your cookie is enabled and your logged into Google permanently, then turn on your personalized homepage, next time you point your browser to http://www.google.com/ you'll automatically be presented with your personalized homepage.
I was pleased with the latest additions of various gadgets to Google Personalized Homepage. I might be jumping my gun by saying this, but maybe we are starting to see the whole "Google OS" experience coming together? I am finally seeing all these random projects Google started / purchased come together.
On my personalized page, I have following gadgets:
- news feeds (if you call Engadget and Digg.com a valid news source)
- del.icio.us bookmarks
- Google Reader (basic RSS reader)
- Google Calendar (love the app)
- Gmail (these days no one has a simpler email tool than Google does)
- driving direction
- local traffic
- world clocks (so I can avoid calling my mom at the middle of the night)
- wikipedia search form
- dictionary.com search form
- stock chart for my favorite company: Apple
Wow, now that's a lot of information. I have accesses to my email and schedules, quickly get the live info (stock, news feed, traffic, world clock, etc), look up topics of interest (wikipedia and dictionary.com). All of this information fits on a single page without needing to scroll. This is simply amazing. A similar effect can be achieved via Apple's Dashboard, but I hate spawning too many Dashboard Widgets since each widget initializes a whole new process and eats up memory and CPU time. If I can just spend Google's beyond-finite CPU power on my tasks, it's a perfect crime I can love.
Having said that, I could use a lot more improvements on these gadgets. To list some:
1. Driving Direction module could use some pop-up based address memorization
2. My del.icio.us module (which is one of a few del.icio.us gadgets available) should give me an option to use the search form against my own bookmarks, not the entire network.
3. They need to let me resize gadget geometries.
4. Many of the world clock modules take forever to load (probably because they haven't optimized the flash animation). I don't need anything fancy, just give me something that can display a couple of different locations that loads fast.
5. A better Google Reader module is in order.
6. Better miniature mode for the gadgets. For example even when minimized, the Gmail gadget needs to show how many unread emails there are.
Google Notebook
Google Notebook is a combination of Google webapp and a Firefox plug-in. The Firefox plug-in provides the way for users to take contents out of a website and submit to the own Notebook. It's kinda like scrap booking. Remember back when you had to cut out newspaper articles then glue them onto a notebook? Now you can do all of that in within Firefox and the result is saved on Google's own server, which we all know is never gonna lose your data.
You can spawn multiple notebooks and just about any object on a website that are highlightable can be added to your Notebook. You can add your own notes along side captured contents in your note.
The result is something like this. Very slick. The editor is simple and Firefox plug-in is also very simple to use. Of course the problem with Google (with the exception of some of the latest tools) is the lack of UI designers. (Don't even get me started on that!) As the result, Google Notebook is not very presentable. But then again, I don't think you are submitting a scrapbook filled with other people's idea to your boss or professor. That's what Writely is for. Anyway, all that for free and you don't even have to launch an extra application... uh, unless Firefox isn't your browser of choice.
The only complaint I have is its inability to take embedded contents (Flash movies and such) into the Notebook. That would be the ultimate. For example I can take notes about some YouTube clip I found.
