Despite the popularity of personalized homepages, I hadn’t been using one. At home my homepage was the normal Google search page; at work it’s a wiki I use for taking notes.
Well, my tab order has now changed. I’m using my personalized Google homepage, with my Google Calendar, Gmail, quotes of the day, a NASA picture, and weather. All of this was available before, so what made me change?
Google started offering visual themes for what had been a boring page. I tried it out, and was mildly impressed with the results. Still not that interested, until I realized the themes change depending on the time of day. So now I have the Tea House theme, with pleasant green accents across the page, and what appears to be a hat-wearing fox that lives in a house in an orange grove. The fox does different things depending on the time of day, such as having lunch in the grove right now. (It looks like sushi, not squirrel.)
Yes, that was the tipping point for me. My first tab in Firefox is now set to the adventures of a hat-wearing fox that doesn’t really do much all day, but appears to be very happy doing it. It also shows my email, appointments, local weather, and the like, but who cares? The hat-wearing fox is having lunch, so it must be time for lunch. :)
(I think I’ve regressed to kindergarten. What I’m hoping is that the hat-wearing fox naps during the afternoon.)
Update: The fox just washes clothes all afternoon. Yep, fox clothes.