Thing 14 - Online Productivity Tools

I created homepages on iGoogle, PageFlakes and My Yahoo to compare all three. I liked the look of the iGoogle page much better than the other two. It was cleaner and had the date, time and weather right up front where I like to see it. I liked that the news was from CNN and the NY Times, which are my favorites. I thought the PageFlakes page looked too crowded and there was no time or calendar visible. On the My Yahoo page the weather bar was too big and did not have enough information. The local news was from Jacksonville, not Gainesville in spite of putting in my zip code. Also, the top news stories were so far down on the page that I had to scroll down to find them. So of the three, the iGoogle page gets my vote.

My preference for Google products seems to continue. I liked the Google Calendar and would use it at work, but probably not at home because I prefer to use the wall calendar there so my whole family can refer to it.

I looked at Ta da list and Remember the Milk. I was not impressed with Ta da. Remember the Milk has an app on iPhone which would be great if only I had an iPhone. Otherwise, I don't think I will be using these. I like paper copies of to do lists similar to my shopping lists.

Now, on to Backpack. Here is an online productivity tool that I think could be really useful to an organization. It has pages, a group calendar, multiple calendars, a newsroom, reminders pages and writeboards. A library group could get a whole lot of work done using this tool. I liked the look of it and the variety of tools in this all-in-one productivity center.