Thing #29: Google Tools

Great tools here, for sure! They're fun and powerful.

The first one I tried was Google News. I hadn't realized you could get headlines and stories aggregated in Google from so many places. I tried the archives search and was really impressed. Hadn't realized all this stuff was available outside of paid databases. I recently read All Quiet on the Western Front for a class I'm taking in WWI literature. So I typed "Erich Maria Remarque" in the News Archives search box. I got some really interesting results back to the time the book was published. Also an old New York Times article from when Remarque and Paulette Goddard were married.

Then I tried GMail. Or maybe I should say I retried GMail. At the urging of my son, I opened an account back in 2005 when it was brand new and only a select number of "invitations" were given out to join, and my son got me invited. But I didn't really use it -- not because I disliked it but because I was used to my Yahoo account and satisfied enough that I didn't see the need to change.

It was fun to sign back on and see that my old account was still there. I was impressed by GMail's spam-blocking power and also impressed by the various features that can be added.

I went back to the iGoogle page I created recently and had fun with that. I chose "Theme for a Day," which means each day you get a random new theme and had a pretty pattern by designer Anna Sui. In fact, Google has lots of designer themes. With the attractiveness and the useful options and the way all the features work together, I could see switching to iGoogle as my personal home page.