I don’t know how many of you use it, but Google’s Personalised Homepage is where I start my browsing experience. Its clean and simple and very well thought out in my view.

When I start my browser, I see my Gmail on the left, a clock and the weather in the middle and then my Google Calendar on the right. I like things very clean and simple, but useful too.

When I opened my browser this weekend, I noticed something had changed. They’ve added tabs!!! Yay! About time! Simply put this has allowed me to add a lot more info to my homepage without it cluttering up my experience.

So now I have a “home” tab as described above. I also have Local and Tech news tabs. I have even added an RSS feeds tab with some of the blogs I should be reading more often. Oh, and then theres the tab devoted to Second Life with the RSS feed from Google News (yes I have a custom gNews feed for Second Life news) as well as all the main Second Life related blogs. :-)

And its not cluttered. This is great.

My Yahoo! has had this for a while, but the interface there always bothered me. Yahoo! has always come off as just being too crowded no matter how you try to break it down. Google has come up with a UI that is far and away the best yet. And the fact that it integrates so well with the Google apps I use daily is even better.

A few weeks back I started on a post that went through all the Google apps I use and why I use them. In the end I left it as a draft because the simple fact was, I really don’t venture outside the Google sites/properties very often. Google provides nearly my complete web experience. Blogger, Writely, Spreadsheets, Calendar, Gmail, Notebook, Search, News, Groups, Language Translater… And thats just the ones I use often.

Scary though it may sound, if its not Second Life related, Google has essentially become the majority of my Internet experience. Although, I don’t use Google Reader anymore. However, if they made the interface more like a combination of Gmail and Notebook that’d definitely change. The interface is really the only reason I don’t use it.

Actually, I think I will sit down and finish that post anyway ;-) Might be interesting to get feedback on it. ;-)