14 DAY TRIAL // I'm already tired of all the products coming out on the market in order to get a slice of the election cash pie. I wish that they would just have a meeting and come together one day and decide something like "a week from now, at 12 o'clock, we'll all release our election gadgets, pages and anything else we'll possibly think of by then, in close connection to the main event of the political stage in the US for 2008."
That's obviously just utopia, but it would still be nice. Either way, Google announced the arrival of a new category on the US News homepage, especially for the Elections, just before the Christmas. The elections page also includes a tabbed gadget that will show videos, news and blog posts related to your favorite candidates. It is entirely customizable, but note that there is no connection between it and the news page; whatever changes in the gadget you choose to operate, they will not reflect in the entire elections section.
Despite the recipe of success that Yahoo! came up with, to present its users with an up-to-date dashboard that contains information from polls, search queries and predictions, Google chose not to go this way and didn't at least link to its Trend charts, not to mention bringing them to the first page.
The Mountain View based company has got it all covered right now, with the debates that were viral hits on YouTube and later with the same gadget that is presented on the News page released as a stand alone product earlier in December. Furthermore, Google came to be one of the most important stops in the political campaigns of the candidates, eight of them, both democrats and republicans, have so far visited the Googleplex and, by far, Ron Paul was the most successful of the lot with the engineers.