My iGoogle Dektop is getting better and better

Some great gadgets have made my iGoogle homepage really cool and helpful:

1. Netvibes universal widgets ecosystem - the widgets developers are building for Netvibes are stronger, cleaner, and more interesting usually than what has come out on iGoogle itself. Now most of those widgets can be ported to iGoogle for use on your homepage, (they also work for just about every other widget platform around).
The most impressive widget might be the Facebook iPhone widget, which lets you navigate through the slick, compact iPhone interface for Facebook directly embeded in your iGoogle homepage.
The second is Twitter King, which is a comprehensive and clean twitter widget that lets you see twitter updates and send your own, as well as direct message, right within the interface.

2. Compound gadget built in the iGoogle interface lets you combine several gadgets that you use little but want available often. In my case I have gMail, Google docs, and Google Calendar all at in one gadget - I leave gMail live so I can see when I have new email, but then I have easy access to my calendar and my documents when I need to use one or the other (this is the type of combined interface that gMail should possibly have at some point).

All in all I have 11 widgets on the page in some fashion. I can read blog posts, listen to music, browse social networks, manage my communication, read the news, and more without leaving the iGoogle homepage at all.

Playing With the Joost Video Player

I grabbed an invite to the Joost beta test last night, and gave it a shot (Joost, if you remember, is the peer to peer -P2P - streaming video application from the billionaire makers of Skype and Kazaa).  First impressions are pretty good - the interface is smooth, changing content happens quickly, and video loads almost immediately.  The way navigation overlays above the video content playing at all times is pretty cool.  Also, the widget overlay was a surprise to me, and very cool - you can add RSS feeds, Google Chat, group chat rooms about the video you're watching, and more.  When you IM with someone via the Google Chat widget, you can see right through every window and continue to watch content.







The value of this is of course going to be the content - what's available to watch.  To be big, Joost needs to offer some A-list content, not shows that are less popular, or discontinued, or niche channels that won't appeal across the board.  There are some major advertisers on board, so hopefully we'll start seeing sponsored content soon.  The advertising spots are expected to be a mix of pre-mid-post roll, ticker ads on the bottom, and branded call outs in the corners, similar to broadcast TV.  Say what you want about everything moving online - a desktop video application that offers internet features is easy to use, and could easily take off if the content's right.



If you want an invite to Joost, e-mail me - I owe Mashable for giving me my invite, and I'll do my best to send some out myself.

Technorati Tags: joost, p2p, video, desktop, skype, kazaa, google chat, gchat, mashable

Turning Microsoft Windows into a Mac Desktop

Slowly my Windows desktop is starting to look like a Mac. Rocketdock adds a slick scrolling link bar that zooms in and out, allows applications to be minimized to the bar, and auto-hides, just as the Mac standard desktop has. Yahoo! Widgets has a faded out desktop widget state, including options for a hot-key widget overlay, allowing you to add live gadgets to your desktop. Google Desktop allows in-file search of everything on your computer, indexed immediately, so that you can find word documents, pictures, and even gMail (online email) files that have what you're looking for in the internal text of the document.

Technorati Tags: windows, widgets, gadgets, desktop, mac, yahoo, confabulator, google, rocketdock