How-to: Personalized Homepage & Groups

Frederick Faulkner has written a great article describing how to make your browser homepage work better for you. Faulkner's Practice Web Strategies for Attorneys: Do Something More With Your Browser Homepage offers suggestions for a variety of sites that you can personalize with news, calendars, favorites, and to-do lists, to name just a few.

He specifically mentions Google, Windows Live, MyYahoo, MyMSN, and Netvibes. Then he details step-by-step how to create your own homepage on Netvibes.

I have created personalized pages on both MyYahoo and Google and appreciate the ease of use. Both offer a great many advantages for organizing information in a one-stop shop setting.

Another great service provided by Yahoo!, Google and MSN is the option to a create group page. As Yahoo! puts it, a group is "where people with a shared interest meet, get to know each other, and stay informed." Are you on a committee and need to share files or take polls? Do you want to share photos with family and friends? Again, I have been part of groups on both Yahoo! and Google and find their services to be very useful.

While you and your group members must have accounts with the service you use (yet another account to track--tiresome, at best, I know), the utility of the group page may outweigh the addition of another user ID and password to the ever-growing list of online accounts you have to manage.