Google Claims Another Sliver of My Life

As a follow-up to yesterday's post, first of all I'm thankful for all the suggestions, commentary, and witticisms I got on my blog and on Facebook. I am fortunate to have such intelligent, helpful, and informed friends.

And, after little deliberation, I've decided I'm going to experiment with iGoogle. Strange, I know, since I believe it is intended to be a mobile phone app, and I have no such capability. But I could not pass up the opportunity to customize a screen that has what I want and nothing else (in my case: three blurbs on news/world/politics/business, US financial market summary, Philly weather, and, as a nice bonus, a box for my Gmail account).

Ironically, I used to use a similar customized screen for years: MyYahoo. Of course, when Google arrived on the scene, its clean interfaces contrasted sharply with Yahoo's cluttered screens. Years later, nothing's changed: the Google and iGoogle layouts are far less jarring than most of what's out there.

So let the great iGoogle experiment begin. The upside: less extra stuff to clutter up my limited and already cluttered brainspace. The downside: the extra stuff is what's currently taking up the American brainspace, so now I'll be even further removed from pop culture. Well, soon enough, I'll be consuming vicariously through my children anyway.