Google Personalized home page

Browsers that I regularly use, Internet Explorer, Maxthon and Firefox, all have a default home page. And it is annoying. I undertand the need to promote themselves. And they all have option to change. I would rather have this option in a more prominent place though. Anyway, I always change IE home to a blank page. IE loads long enough to make it load a page every time.

Now I am considering changing that. The reason is Google Personalized Home Page. When you go to www.google.com you can see a page in 3 different ways. Most people, like me, see a simle and clean page with input for text and button.

If you however click on a line on the top right corner - personalized home, you can get to a different page, the one you can, well, personalize. But move to a next computer, or even another browser, and your personalization is lost.

If you have a google account, and I suggest you should, you can login. And then you see a third version, a logged-in personalized home, the one that is persistent to your google account, and will be with you wherever you log into google again.

In the world of web hype we're living, personalizaton is claimed by every one. For most it is no more then change of background color. Google homepage is an example of what web personalization should be.

You personalize by populating a page (or several pages, since you have tabs) with Google Gadgets.
Google Gadgets are tiny web applications. Maximized IE browser shows 9-12 such gadgets, arraged in 3 columns.
Gadgest can vary in height but most are small.

Every Gardget is planned to do one thing. There are world clocks, sticky notes ,to do lists, wather, webcam viewers.
Some are written by Google. Most are written by third parties.

You can place more gadgets then fit one page, and scroll to it. Ha. Instead you can open second tab, third etc. That is what I did. I have 2 tabs. First is for info. I have my WIkipedia search gadget, world clock showing time of my remote coleagues, news from PC Mag, CNET, techbargains, techsupportalert (a very good service I should block about some time in the future). My second tab is called Office. I have a gadget showing my recently edited spreedsheets and Writely documents. I have a gmail gadget showing new email. I have google talk to quickly IM with buddies. I have AIM and Microsoft messangers too, and soon will add Yahoo.