I've always had one complaint about iGoogle - not enough theme customization! Luckily, this new iGoogle Alternative has set out to fix that problem!
Here's an example of what one of their pages look like. Now this page is a daily show theme, but the site has thousands of different themes. Unlike iGoogle where you STILL only get to put a tiny little theme graphic on your page, these themes cover the entire page. I've only had one for a few days and I've had a handfull of people tell me how cool looking it was. God I'm cool.
Rather than a ton of widgets flying all over the place, AwesomeStart focuses on being more like the original Google homepage: simple, clean, and easy to use.
Best of all they now have their own theme creator, so you can make your own theme. How hard is it? Actually pretty flippin easy. All you have to do is tell the site the URL of the image you want to use. You can even use a photobucket or Picasa image. Stick it in there, pick your colors, and you're pretty much ready to go. They even offer some rounding options to make the theme that much more good looking.
I know giving up iGoogle is blasphemy around here, but consider me one of the converted. I still have an iGoogle page for when I need to use the widgets to do some work, crunch some numbers, etc but this is now my Chrome startpage.
Get it: Flixster Movies
Like movies? You'll like Flixster. The number one movie application from Apple's iPhone, MySpace and of course Facebook is now on iGoogle. This widget gives you reviews, show times, and trailers for all the latest films. Never to be confined to the darkened theater, Flixster also covers what's new on DVD as well. You can browse through their catalogue of 50,000+ movies.
Fans of Flixster may want to give Google Movies and the Fandango App a try as well.
I really wish there was some way to share your iGoogle page. You spend all this time setting up all these crazy features and what now, and then there's no way to show off your work! Hours. HOURS I put into this beautiful page. Come on!
I mean, I guess you could always just take a screen shot but that's not fun. Maybe I did something revolutionary with my layout that I want other people to be able to take advantage of. Isn't that how the web evolved? We need to be able to piggyback.
I've never even seen another person's iGoogle, how do I know that I'm not doing something fundamentally wrong? Maybe I'm using my page like a total novice. I want to see what everyone else's iGoogle looks like. What do you use it for? Take a screenshot!
See you in the comments.
Get it: ToDo Widget
If you're of the GTD mindset (that's get-things-done, for the uninitiated) you pretty much need ToDo. This widget lets you track everything on your to do list. You can create multiple lists for different purposes, and even share the lists with your friends. I think this one really speaks for itself, so I won't ramble on a ton here.
It's only a matter of time until someone posts a To-Do widget on any given platform; I'm just glad Labpixies got to it first. While I'm a big fan of the widget, I did having trouble getting it to save my list. I'm not sure what the problem was, but after messing around with it for a while it seemed to work out alright.
GTD fans may also want to consider the more simple Google To Do List or My Listy
ZDNet ran an interesting article on iGoogle.
Under the opening "Google wants you to express yourself", they talk a lot about Google's decision to rename the service and where they should go from here. The article is a little dated, but it's interesting to look at it and see what happens then.
I guess I'm just amused people still call them "gadgets" instead of widgets!