igoogle, Pageflake and My Yahoo
I appreciated that both iGoogle and My Yahoo let me log in with my Yahoo email information. Creating the many accounts for these explorations is daunting, even with a dedicated notebook.
iGoogle was my favorite. It offered the same simplicity of page design that is the earmark of Google itself. Everyone is provided with YouTube videos, Weather for your area (you give them your zip at the start), date and time, CNN headlines, How to of the day (a curiosity) and Top stories.
You can add tabs for other interests. I chose Technology, Entertainment and Games. There were top stories from well known sites in the Technology and Entertainment categories. The Games page had the NYT Crossword, Hangman!, Flood It, Frogger, Pacman, Color Junction and Sudoku (get thee behind me, mathematical thing!) I was of course drawn immediately to Hangman. I had no idea I loved it so much, but I began swinging the little guy with my wild guesses almost immediately.
PageFlake knew my location without any information being provided by me, and put up the weather and time and date. I think because the site already knew soooo much I wasn't interested in signing up and personalizing. Also, the big boxy squares of information are unappealing and too much at once.
MyYahoo, when customized, looks very much like the usual Yahoo page with added date, time, weather, and what seemed to me to be limited categories of interest to choose from: Shopping, Fashion, Photography, Arts, Shoes and accessories, Home and garden.
Calendars
MSN has a calendar within your Hotmail or MSN mail that is a simple version of regular Outlook. If you are comfortable with Outlook and just want a handy calendar, this might be for you.
Kiko I could not get Kiko's site to load. I don't know if it was just down or gone altogether or what.
Backpack This is a group calendar that might be nice for a group/subcommitee or club to use to dynamically share their progress on a project.
Spongecell promotes itself as an event marketing tool. The calendar itself hasn't much detail but when you click on an item on the calendar a nice box pops up with color and event information. Might be nice for storytimes or other programs so that you could include pictures of the performer?
Ta-Da Lists and Remember the Milk
The Ta-da list was a simple and easy to use interface. Simple to add, check off or edit items. There is the option to email a copy to yourself and also to Share so perhaps you might actually get your spouse to add things to the grocery list if it came right up in his email or on his Blackberry.
Remember the Milk has a sweet cow picture but it was not easy to use and I could not get it to add items to a list it just paused and paused and paused. So Ta-Da wins the day.
I did look at the additional calendars and sticky note organizers but they did not offer anything more than I had seen. The file conversion tools are something to keep in mind.
Thing 13 complete, ta da!.
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