A homepage of widgets and gadgets

I've been looking for something like this for years and it's very nearly perfect.

Essentially, this is a tool for building a custom webpage with personalised content, widgets and gadgets. It is powered by, unsurprisingly, Google and uses your Google Account to store and configure your personal homepage.

There are many widgets and gadgets to choose from, from boring but essential items like calendars, todo lists, tv guides, currency converters to more interesting ones such as RSS News feeds from sites of your choice and list of recent emails.

You can create your own Google Gadgets too, which is just as well, since no matter how hard I look, I can't find a gadget that allows me to just write and save hyperlinkable URLs to the page - huh? This is basic HTML, but of course I want a simple WYSIWYG editor.

Apple have been developing Dashboard which is built into Mac OS X and is a similar sort of feature with widgets that do cool and useful stuff for users. What I just don't get, is why would I disappear off to another (hidden) part of the operating system to perform certain functions?

I've long since wanted tools such as the ones talked of above, to be available from the desktop of my computer, but on reflection, that's a bit limiting. Access through a web browser just seems more natural and makes me wonder how soon it will be before the desktop becomes the web browser. Can't be that far off.

One of the significant advantages of Google's Personalised Homepage, is that I can access the tools and features that I selected from any browser on any system.

Just a few of the gadgets on offer from Google