Not too long ago, iGoogle was better known as Google Personalized Homepage. iGoogle lets you create a customised homepage that you can set as your browser’s default page with all you want to see when you fire it up.

Here are a few things you can do with your iGoogle page:

Change The Theme

Google also gives you with a nice bunch of themes to choose from. Click on the “Select theme” link. Choose one of the themes and click Save. And remember, these themes are not just plain-old-colour-change themes. Most of the themes are dynamic, that means they change as according to the time of day at your location.

Add Gadgets

Familiar with widgets? Google calls them Gadgets. There are hundreds of gadgets in several categories. Click on Add Stuff, find the gadget you like and click Add it now. The gadget will be added your homepage.

Make Your Own Gadgets
Google gives you a base to start off with your own little Gadgets. To add your own Gadgets, click on Add Stuff. Then, click on “My Community”. On the next page click “Write your own gadget”. You will come to a page with an option to choose between some seven presets.

Click on a preset suitable for the Gadget you’re planning on making. Enter the information for that Gadget and click on “Preview gadget” to get an idea of what it will look like. If you’re pleased with the results, click on “Create gadget”.

Add A New Tab

If you reach a point when there are too many gadgets in your iGoogle page, you can choose to put the less important ones in a new tab. Click on the “Add a tab” link. You will be asked to enter a name for the tab. Once the tab is created, you can click on Add Stuff to add new Gadgets to that tab. You can also move Gadgets from one tab to another by clicking the title bar of the Gadget and dragging it into the tab name.
Add Feeds To iGoogle

iGoogle lets you do some basic feed reading as well. The steps are similar to adding Gadgets. Click on Add Stuff. Click on “Add by URL” next to the search button.

Enter the URL for the feed and click Add. Next, click on Close, and go to the main iGoogle Page. You will find the feed listing there. You can change the number of news items displayed by clicking on the drop-down and selecting “Edit settings”. Use the drop-down to change the number of news items and click Save.

View Gadget Source
Anyone can view the source code for Gadgets. Click on the drop-down in the title bar of a Gadget and click “About this gadget”. A new page with comments from users will be displayed. Click on the “View source” link to view the source for the Gadget. On the right panel, lists of similar gadgets are displayed for you to choose from.

So Go and Personalize your iGoogle page now!

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Google made the announcement today about their acquisition of Postini for $625 million, a hosted enterprise communication security solution that enables companies to protect their users from things like viruses and phishing attacks. It also provides a robust archiving service that helps organizations stay in compliance with regulations.

Postini is the global leader in on-demand communications security, compliance, and productivity solutions for email, instant messaging, and the web. Postini’s award-winning services are designed to protect customers from viruses, spam, phishing, fraud, and other attacks; encrypt messages to ensure confidentiality and privacy; and archive communications to ensure compliance with regulations and to prepare for e-discovery.

Since the for-pay version of Google Apps was launched, Postini has been one of the third party services available as a paying subscriber. Now the company is a part of Google, it wouldn’t surprise me if pieces of the Postini solution find their way into the free edition of Google Apps in the future.

Google launched a new official communications blog for Gmail at:

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/

The first post went live this morning with a welcome message, so there is not much to look at yet, but if it follows the path of other official Google blogs, it will be used for product enhancement announcements, tips, and other notifications.

Google Inc. launched a Linux version of Google Desktop on Wednesday, almost three years after the product’s launch for the Windows operating system.

The application, designed for indexing and finding data in PCs, as well as for searching the Web, also comes in a Mac OS X version, introduced in April of this year.

Like the Mac OS X version, Google Desktop for Linux is a beta, or test, product. The Windows version shed its beta tag already, meaning Google considers it a more stable and mature product.

At this point, Google Desktop for Linux does not feature the Sidebar and Gadget features present in the Windows version.

Gadgets are mini-applications that display things such as e-mail, weather data, photos and news on the desktop. The Sidebar is a vertical panel where the Gadgets can be organized.

This Linux version, developed by Google’s Beijing engineering team, is available in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch, simplified and traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Portuguese.

Google Desktop for Linux runs on Debian 4.0, Fedora Core 6, Ubuntu 6.10, SUSE 10.1, and Red Flag 5.

Google updated their Docs and Spreadsheets service with a new start page, one that turns the old list view into a two-pane workspace. Users can now see a larger listing of their documents and spreadsheets, as well as organize them in folders. Yes, you read that right–Google is letting users create and manage their stuff in folders. Users can even drag and drop files. Any pre-existing tags today have been turned into their own folders.

There have also been a few other changes under the hood. Besides the bluer, smoother exterior, Google Suggest is now built into the file search bar. This means that when you’re looking for a certain file, you can just begin typing and the engine will start to bring up search results before you’ve even hit the search button.