5 Essential Gadgets On My iGoogle Home Page

I’m a person that just hates to have to switch back and forth through different windows. For example, typically I would have tabs or windows set up for: Gmail, FaceBook, and TweetDeck. Now I don’t have to. I use my iGoogle page as my command center. I am master of all I survey (smile). Here are my 5 essential gadgets for my iGoogle Home Page. I am also going to provide you with a link to each gadget so that you will not have to search for it.

My life kind of revolves around Gmail and I use it to interface with a hosted domain. Finding a Google gadget to perform this task was tougher than one might think. There are plenty of Gmail gadgets out there but only 3 for hosted domains. Two of those appear to be identical. What is nice about this is that it is really a stand alone product designed for mobile apps. This means that I can go to any box, read any message, and compose messages (if desired) without even having to go to my main email page which I can do just by clicking on the black bar at the top. Warning: This thing gave me fits when I upgraded to FireFox 3.5. I had to go back to 3.0.

Naturally, I also need to be able to access FaceBook. This FaceBook gadget is better designed to monitor activity rather than to post comments, however, you can also do that. FaceBook, as we are all aware, has massive amounts of content on every page so I would still suggest that you do your heavy lifting from the actual site itself.

As you can see, though, it does provide you to access to your home page, profile, friends, and inbox. You can click on any friend shown and it will take you to their page. All in all, it works well for what it is intended to do.

I just found and added this Twitter gadget over the weekend and I just love it! You can do just about anything with it that you can do on TweetDeck or Seesmic. I can post Tweets, shorten URLs, shorten Tweets, do replies, direct message, follow or unfollow, go to that person’s page, or in one click go to my main Twitter page. It is an amazingly robust client. You may have to use some CTRL commands vs. clicking on an icon but, everything you need is pretty much there. Hover over somebody’s image and it brings up their profile. Hover over a shortened URL and it give you the full address. And, unusal for most gadgets like this that I see, there are several user custom settings. Sweet!

My Top 10 Favorite Social Media Apps

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O.K., I lied. I think there are about 16 here (smile). About a month ago I did a post entitled “10 Tools That Make My Life Worth Living”.  A lot more cool toys have surfaced since that time so here is my updated list (in alphabetic order):

GizaPage: Think of GizaPage has your own personal webpage that directs others to all of your social media sites including Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn, or any other place that you might have a profile or some sort of presence. So, instead of providing all these addresses you just say www.craigmjamieson.gizapage.com. That’s it. Simple and easy. Someone I spoke to told me that I could also do that on FriendFeed, and you can, but for this purpose, I like the GizaPage format better. I also discovered another interesting function of GizaPage while I was just trying some things out. When you log onto my Twitter tab, it takes you to an app called TweeTree. I have never heard of it but it looks a lot like a standard Twitter page. But, get this, it is also calling up the actual link content that you include in your tweets. For example, a couple of my recent tweets were for new blog postings. These are generated automatically by TwitterFeed along with a link to the post. TweetTree not only shows the tweet, it also shows the post itself including the Jing videos. Sweeet!!!

HootSuite: HootSuite is a lot like TweetLater in that you can schedule tweets to go out on a delayed schedule. It’s is also like TweetDeck in that you can use it to monitor your Twitter activity. And, it has some other cool tools. I am hoplessly in love with it’s FireFox toolbar button called the “Hootlet”. When reading a page you’d like to share, click on the Hootlet button and a tweet is created, the url is shortened, and you can send the tweet now or schedule it for later. And do all of this while never leaving the page you are reading. They should really call this thing HootSweeeet (smile).