One way of lightening the overload

As mentioned here, I only recently started to use Twitter after being convinced of its very qualitative qualities at our SP3 Summit. Although previous to that, I did feel that I might be missing a trick (or two) in not subscribing to such things, this concern was outweighed by my reluctance to (a) clutter my bookmarks with them, (b) regularly visit and maintain my presence on them or, to sum things up in two words: information overload.

After subscribing to Twitter I endeavoured (for a while at least) to find a solution to these problems and ended up testing out a few services which only seemed to either half address my concerns or simply added to them.  I gave up.

Little did I know that the answer was under my nose.

Last week, I was asked by our recruitment arm to deliver a complimentary training session to a number of temps themed around Web 2.0.  Immediately, I started to construct its content and structure in my mind.  The focus would be on an emergent and, what is to many people still, a somewhat controversial Web 2.0 phenomenon known as microblogging (specifically web2ools such as Twitter). 

I then considered that these temps are more than likely to subscribe to such things as Facebook already and may view the advent of additional applications as an unwanted burden on their existence, in much the same way as I would have... This resparked my previous endeavour, this time motivated by a strong desire to deliver a satisfying training session consisting of a solution to this problem. 

Serendipity! This is what was right under my nose:

(click to enlarge)

You can see my various widgets linking to my favourite web2ools from one platform, where I can interact with them (albeit in a lite version) without going to the website proper.

iGoogle's been a revelation but are there any alternatives? And how do they rate in comparison?

Comments

[Jenny Evans]

Netvibes www.netvibes.com and Pageflakes pageflakes.com do similar things. I prefer Netvibes, although do use iGoogle as well (as I use Google reader).