Thing 29: Google Tools

I already have a GMail account and use Google calenders so I thought I would look at another Google tool like Alerts. It was really easy to create an alert and after receiving several updates via email I found that using the Comprehensive search type is difficult when you have a basic topic; so dependent on your search topic you may need to play around with what search type you use. Also, you may need to play around with your search terms to eliminate miscellaneous alerts. I feel that alerts can be a really helpful tool that everyone can use but it does need some tweaking in the set up; but really helpful once you have set it up the way you want.

Thing 28: Customized Home Pages

I think that customized Home Pages are an interesting aspect to explore and it was interesting to look at Pageflakes and Netvibes; without having to mess with my iGoogle or My Yahoo page. Having your own personalized Home Page can be a fun thing. The main problem I have with customized Home Pages is that they alway seem to take forever to load so if I want to do something on that page I usually have to wait for the page to load which can take a while. If I need to move to another website the loading customized Home Page can cause me to waste time while I watch it load. However, they are fun to look at. In all, they are interesting ideas and if I had better internet speed I may consider them but for right now I am just wasting time loading images and widgets I really don't need to view.