For the past few years my browser home page has alternated between http://news.google.com and http://my.yahoo.com. I like Google News for the variety of news they provide but end up gravitating back to Yahoo! News because I like having my stock quotes, weather reports and favorite news all in a single dashboard.

This morning I decided to try out live.com. After laying out my page, I went to microsoftgadgets.com to see what gadgets I could use to 'pimp my home page' and I found a beauty; the Seattle Bridge Traffic Gadget . I've talked about the power of gadgets in the past but this brought home to me how powerful it is to allow people to extend their personalized portal in whatever ways they wish. Below is a screenshot of my home page.

I'm definitely toying with building my own gadgets now. Matt has a killer gadget he's been working on in his free time that I think will be much appreciated by live.com users. If I ever find some free time, I suspect the gadget I'll end up writing will be one that has to do movie listings. Perhaps a gadget that shows the box office rankings of the previous week and also upcoming listings with information on local showtimes. Or maybe an MSN Spaces photo album gadget in the same vein as the Flickr gadget. There are not enough hours in the day...