iGoogle: fun and easier than writing

Continuing my informal series on things you can do to put off doing any creative writing, this morning I discovered the web's perfect diversion for anyone wishing to further their procrastinating career: iGoogle.

Here's my iGoogle home page. You can add and delete gadgets with a couple of clicks, and rearrange them on the page by dragging 'n' dropping.

iGoogle is the new name for Google Homepage, and it's basically a fully customisable page which you can use instead of the regular www.google.com or www.google.co.uk. Once you have a Google account you can populate your iGoogle page with Gadgets -- small programs that each do one specific thing like givea weather forecast or show the BBC news headlines. There are all sorts of gadgets including games, and once your page is full of stuff you can just create a new tab and start filling up again. One really neat thing is the option to let Google fill your new tab automatically based on its name. Elliot, for example, created a tab called "Guitar" and Google filled it with guitar chord gadgets, tabulature finders, and other things a guitarist would want to have at their fingertips.

When you create a new tab you can have Google populate it with relevant content to the tab name. Here's my Writing tab.

By far and away the best gadget I've found so far is Boneless Girl: a completely pointless desktop diversion featuring a bikini-clad girl with no bones falling through a sky filled with large bubbles. As she hits each bubble or group of bubbles her body twists and turns in the kind of improbable positions you'd expect a girl with no bones to get into. It might not sound that interesting but the animation is so good I just can't stop watching it. I've put Boneless Girl on my Games tab in iGoogle and can happily waste half an hour watching her bounce around, dragging her out of tight spots with my mouse and flinging her across the sky for more painful-looking bouncing.

When I'm feeling really lazy I can head on over to my Games tab and work through a Sudoku while playing Deal Or No Deal and watching Boneless Girl go through her paces all at the same time. I've only been at it a day and already I've forgotten how I used to waste time before iGoogle.

It's one of those things you've just got to see to understand. To get your own iGoogle go to www.google.com (or .co.uk, your local Google) and create an account, then click iGoogle to get started.

It's fun, and a great way to not write.