In January 2009 I wrote and released jQuery.dashboard() plugin, which extends jQuery to quickly and easily create dashboard UIs like iGoogle. A handful of people have using it for a while, but in December 2009, it was announced that CiviCRM 3.1 would include a dashboard feature utilising jQuery.dashboard() plugin! CiviCRM 3.1 was released late January 2010. (So this blog post is a little late!)
You can try it out yourself at CiviCRM's Drupal demo site.
It is great to see that people are finding value in code I wrote and it is encouraging that it is so widely used!