Not sure exactly how they chose who to showcase here, but you can see what the person’s homepage looks like and then individually select the gadgets they’ve installed on their pages.

A new little way to feel more in touch with these folks I guess. Interesting way for Google to promote gadgets that are available that people may not have even thought about to search for in their gadget directory.

Do you use iGoogle? What gadgets do you have installed and use?

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Image: Screen grab of Gmail by Jason Bean

I’ve been waiting patiently today as I’ve been hearing everything talk about the cool, new themes for Gmail that have now been released. It was all the buzz today on twitter but every time I opened Gmail it was just the same old look and feel.

A couple of hours ago I noticed a little bit of a change to the look and feel and thought that maybe things were in a rolling staged release for users.

I got home from work, fired up the laptop and bingo! there are the themes all there sitting and waiting on me.

The theme shown above seemed to be the popular one on twitter, and I’ll agree. It does make the Gmail interface nice and friendly. Than in itself is kind of odd in that just about all Google products pride themselves on sparse, utilitarian functionality which I normally enjoy. But this is nice. I may try a couple of different ones, there’s loads to choose form already and I’m sure they’ll keep releasing them and they’ll be expanded upon like the themes from iGoogle have been.

Which is your favorite theme? What themes are you waiting for that would be your favorite? I’m thinking pop stars and sports teams will be the first releases coming soon.

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When I go to Google.com now it goes directly to my iGoogle homepage so I didn’t catch the tools that Google has available for staying on top of Olympics information until I just visited their site from another computer.

They’ve got a nice Olympics widget you can add to your iGoogle page that gives you information on upcoming sporting events schedule, medal counts and general Olympic news. I really like it, makes it really easy to quickly get some information.

They also have links to Olympics related video and an neat little application that mashes Google maps into the fray with some neat graphics and Olympic information.

Go uncover more Olympics information with Google for yourself and feed your Olympics addiction like I am today.

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I noticed earlier today that iGoogle has gone through another slight redesign. Maybe you could consider it a little bit more than a slight redesign though since some of the basic navigation has been switched around.

As you can see from the image above, the navigation and links are now listed in a sidebar on the left-hand side of the page, with each component on the page listed below each page name. Quite a bit different from how the original tabs were displayed at the top of the page as shown below.

I like the new layout though. Not really sure why, maybe it’s just because happy with the almost expected sidebar navigation with most sites.

What do you think? Like the new changes or not?

Uncover yourself a new homepage at:

www.igoogle.com

Post from: Uncover the Internet

Google has added quite a few new themes to their options for their personalized iGoogle homepage. Including a number of great looking ones from some famous artists.

My favorite though is this new sunlight earth calendar. I just like the idea of seeing how the available sunlight changes depending on the time locally and what parts of the world are dark.

It’s even more interesting when you’ve got clients and friends all over the world that you begin communicating with more and more via e-mail, IM and twitter.

Very cool. What’s your personalized homepage look like? What greets you every time you open your browser?

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