Google Homepage CRM Tools .. I like it...

Saw this yesterday on Google Blogoscoped..and then watched the demo at CRM for Google ... Very slick presentation .. I wonder if this will catch on.. I think that other 3rd parties have a huge opportunity via Google's Api's for this function as well as Google Apps.

clipped from blog.outer-court.com Customer Management for the Google Homepage CRM for Google (CRM means Customer Relationship Management) is a set of gadgets for your personalized Google homepage that allows you to do things like track tasks, manage contacts, add notes, or create appointments. (In the beginning while playing around with this I got a couple of errors from Google’s servers telling me the gadget “information is temporarily unavailable,” but this worked after a while.) I wonder though if tools like these will not simply be made redundant by Google’s homegrown office, which is partly already released (e.g. there’s already an official Calendar widget), and partly to come yet (we’re still in need of a great cross-applications Google contact manager, for example). One benefit of Google-made widgets have is that you don’t need to login to an extra account – in the case of Etelos’ tool, you actually need to login once for every single widget – and that the data is shared with your Google apps, like Gmail. On a related note, the company Realtime Applications released the Google Widget Creator so you can create custom database-like gadgets for your needs (your data will be stored on the company’s server). Check their Flash demo to get an idea of this tool.