Hell is other people's iGoogle themes. I love the custom Google homepage as much as the next person, but the selection of user-submitted themes is, frankly, atrocious. The list ranges from photos of Angelina Jolie to photos of some guy's dog, with very few options that actually hold up over weeks and months of being in your face whenever you open a new browser window. Instead of subjecting you to the worst of the worst -- maybe we'll save them for a Fugly Friday -- I've collected my top 10 well-done iGoogle themes.

Some people just don't want to use a mouse. Sometimes site designers take this demographic into account, sometimes they don't. But if you're a keyboard-only person: Julius Eckert has built a homepage just for you. Keyboardr returns search results from Google, Wikipedia, Youtube, Google Blog Search and others, and gives you a cursor to navigate the results entirely via arrow keys.

The experience of using Keyboardr is slick, but it could be better with one tricky little improvement. The list of results from each search engine seems to function as a separate element on the page, so hitting a right or left arrow takes you to the top of the adjacent list, not to the result that's directly across, as you would expect. This isn't a big deal, but it would make Keyboardr even faster if Julius could get around it. As more features are added (customization would be amazing), I'll give serious consideration to Keyboardr as my primary homepage.

Newsified is a simple, but brilliant, idea. Take your favorite social news sites, the ones you normally read on the web or through RSS, and lay them out like ... a newspaper. It's an old-school approach that actually proves really useful when it comes to deep sites like Metafilter and Digg. You only see a small percentage of the popular content on the front pages of these sites, but Newsified gives a broader view at a glance.

Newsified pages exist for 6 sites so far: Digg, Reddit, Metafilter, Mixx, Delicious and YouTube. It takes the most popular front-page content from those sites and puts it in a prominent position at the top of the page. Then, as you read down, you'll see the deeper content that you might have missed, laid out in convenient capsule form for your consumption. It's a quick, fun way to read news. In fact, I like the concept so much that I'm giving it a try as my homepage this week.

Yahoo! is staring to roll out a new version of the Yahoo! homepage today. Only selected users in the US and UK will see the new page at first, (pictured on the right). But eventually the new Yahoo! will be available for everyone.

So what's new? First off, the list of links on the left side of the page has been replaced by a customizable menu that gives you quick access to information like email, stocks, and weather. And that email section? You it's not just for Yahoo! Mail. You can also link your Gmail account and in time Yahoo! plans to add other services as well.

Yahoo! also plans to make its homepage more social by adding the ability to keep up on what your friends/contacts are doing. That could include notifications when friends upload new pictures to Yahoo!'s Flickr. Or it could include updates from other non-Yahoo! social networking sites.

All this talk about making the new Yahoo! homepage more social and more useful is all well and good. But you can't fool me. The ultimate goal here is to make sure the Yahoo! homepage looks less like the AOL homepage. You know, until AOL decides to copy Yahoo! again.

[via gHacks]

Netvibes has just launched a private beta of its new iteration, Ginger. To those lucky few who were given an invite; now you must know how those kids who found Wonka's Golden Ticket felt. For the rest of us, Netvibes was kind enough to post a run-through of some of their pending and exciting features.

Netvibes has been one of the most popular and easy to use personal start pages for a long while (well, long in internet years; they're like dog years, you know). They offer tons of useful, ready to load widgets. Widgets include eBay, most popular online email accounts such as Yahoo! Mail and Gmail, Facebook, Digg, and many more. You can also insert any RSS feed and set up tabs for different content.

A few features upcoming in Ginger:

• Added 150 Premium Widgets
• Listen to your favorite web radio stations through Netvibes
• 2 GB of free storage space for every registered user
  

Ginger also looks poised to springboard into the next generation of the social internet. You can tag interesting blog posts, pictures, and video from your Netvibes page and then share them with your friends and family.

The official release of Ginger is in January. For now, you can check out Netvibes current release or visit the Ginger preview page.

[Via Cybernet]

Yahoo! has been quietly testing out a new video feature on its homepage: inline videos.

If you have wondered by Yahoo.com over the past few weeks you may have noticed videos such as Barry Bonds breaking the all time home run record, or exclusive Daily Show footage. These were embedded using a preview version of the new inline video player technology that Yahoo! has developed. The service has been rolled out in a new video module that can be found wherever there is a 'play video' button. It allows users to watch videos without leaving a web page. This includes in both email and IM.

Its great staying inside one browser window, especially to watch videos. We all know how tabbed windows seem to grow quite quickly. Yahoo! is the first portal to enable this video technology, with more videos scheduled to launch this week.

Any user of Google's web based offerings probably won't leap at the chance to nominate it for some flashy design award. Let's face it: Google is definitely known for doing function, and doing it well, but the company tends to shy away from rich color and shiny rounded corners because, well, that's just how they roll. That said, you can imagine our surprise today to discover dynamic themes in Google Homepage. There aren't many of them, in fact: pictured above is just one (called 'Bus Stop') of six available themes, but they all bring a very unique, colorful touch to Google's flexible and widgetized landing page service.

A new 'Select Theme' link has been added next to 'Add Stuff' on the right, under which the theme widget will temporarily open at the top right of the widget area. Selecting any theme will change your homepage to match, and once you click 'save' to commit, you'll be offered a Location box to enter or change your zip code, as every theme dynamically changes based on your location, time of day and (for some) even local weather conditions. This is perhaps one of those over-the-top touches Google is known for, but it adds such an interesting layer of creativity to a functional service.

After the jump, check out screenshots of all the themes in action, though note that they were snapped at 7:23am Mountain Standard Time in the US; they should all look at least a little different depending on where you are and what time of day when you go to actually play with them yourself.

Do you use your Google personalized homepage as much as you could? There are plenty of great gadgets that have been developed, including gadgets for weather, to do lists, gas prices, Pacman, and even Live TV.

A new gadget that has entered the field -- created by CamMap -- allows users to watch live TV right on a Google personalized homepage. The CamMap live TV gadget allows users to select from a comprehensive number of channels including News, Entertainment, Kids, Movies, Educational, Sports, Music, and Financial. With such channels as CNN, BBC, MSNBC, Cartoon Network, Animal Planet, Earth Channel, ESPN, MTV, Bloomberg and CNBC. With no downloads required, this is a Time-Waster must for adding to your Google homepage.

[via jjprojects]

Google has unleashed a new Google Talk Gadget for use on your Google personalized homepage. The Talk client -- still only available for PC users -- can be semi-enjoyed by Mac users with this new Gadget implementation that resembles what PC users have been enjoying for quite a while, although it adds a few slick features.

The new Google Talk Gadget shares the functionality of the standalone application where users can see contacts online and chat with them, but has the added bonus of not requiring a download, being accessible from anywhere you have a browser and a connection. It's also embeddable into a blog or website with a single line of code.

The best new features of the Talk Gadget enables users to see previews of photos and videos in conversation windows when URL's from YouTube or Picasa Web Albums are pasted into chat windows.

Check out a video presentation of the Google Talk Gadget in action after the jump.

Personalized start pages are all the rage these days, but Yahoo!'s been providing users with access to a customizable "My Yahoo!" homepage for years. Hot on the heels of Netscape, Yahoo's launched a major upgrade to its My Yahoo! service.

First up, the new interface makes much more use of AJAX than the previous version. But essentially it works like the old My Yahoo! You can drag and drop modules including RSS feeds, weather forecasts, and TV listings across the screen to arrange the page the way you like it. You can add or remove those modules, and you can create multiple pages.

But perhaps the biggest change isn't what you can do. It's what you don't have to do. The first time you open My Yahoo! you'll find a personalized page designed just for you, based on how you've used Yahoo! in the past. If you frequently use Yahoo! to look up movies or TV listings, you'll have access to those items. This is a pretty handy feature if you don't feel like spending hours customizing your start page.

You can also share your start page with other users by sending a message through Yahoo! Mail or Messenger. If you don't see a link atop your My Yahoo! page asking if you want to switch, you can sign up for the new version.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

The beta release of My.Netscape drops tomorrow as a new, improved personalized start page. The enhanced UI is clean and clutter free with no ads (so far). You have access to almost 100 modules to customize your page, including our very own Download Squad module (shameless plug warning) and you can add your own RSS feeds too. There are however some "not yet's" you might find yourself wishing for, such as:

• Personalized data from your old My.Netscape account, including your bookmarks (they are presently working on a migration utility).
  
• Module developer docs (a development kit is promised soon).

On the whole, My.Netscape is a well-designed start page amongst a field of other well-designed Web 2.0 start pages. Developer documentation will help but, as for now, its functionality isn't nearly as wide ranging as competitors such as Netvibes or Pageflakes. Still, the new My Netscape has the potential to bring an infinitely customize-able start page to a whole new demographic, much as Netscape's social news site launch pushed that concept to an untapped audience.

[Thanks Jordan]

Personalized home page site Pageflakes allows you to customize a start page with flakes (the rest of the world calls them widgets, Microsoft calls them gadgets). Flakes include weather forecasts, email services, calendars, to-do lists, and RSS feeds.

Pageflakes has a repository of flakes, and it's about to get a lot bigger. CEO Dan Cohen says the company plans to offer a directory of 10,000 flakes starting next month. Now the thing about widgets that are embedded in web pages is that there's really only so many things you need them to do. Check your email, get maps, keep up on the latest blogs and news web sites, check stock quotes, etc.

I figure there's maybe a few dozen things I might want in a start page, tops. And once you put those few dozen things on a page it becomes cluttered and hard to read. Pageflakes gets around that problem a bit by providing you with tabs, allowing you to create as many custom pages as you'd like. Use one for work, one for checking stocks, another for reading your guilty pleasure blogs.

Some of the new flakes will let you do things like keep track of other users' MySpace pages or share photos. But still, 10,000 seems like an excessively large number of applications. My bet is that about 9,500 of those flakes will be RSS feeds for various web sites.

Google announced today that their specially designed gadgets can be added to any webpage. Google Gadgets were locked into Google Personalized Home and Google Desktop, but now with the breakout of the gadgets, websites are sure to get some nice dynamic and rich content additions.

Currently developed Google Gadgets include Google maps, date & time, jokes, games, news reports, flight status, webcams, and sports scores. Gadgets can also be developed from scratch with the Google Gadget API. I look forward to seeing some intuitive additions of Google Gadgets onto websites.