The sharing function gets improved functionality

Apr 11, 2008 06:06 GMT  ·  By

You have all heard of iGoogle, Google's personalized homepage, which allows you to create your own Google website equipped with all kinds of utilities starting with Gmail and Google Search and ending with to-do lists and weather forecast. Because of its growth up in popularity, Google is continuously working on it and today, the Mountain View-based company rolls out a very important feature for the collaboration functions.

The improved gadget sharing feature allows you to share and edit a gadget's content with any contact you want by pressing a single button. Until now, you've been able to share only the gadget, which means the contact you're sharing to didn't receive the content you had created. According to Jeff Regan, Google Engineer, the new function is only available for a predefined list of gadgets, which is available on this link.

"We've enabled this feature for some of our more popular gadgets to encourage collaboration, but of course it doesn't make sense for every gadget. For example, you can share a weather or movie listings gadget with a friend, but data sharing is not enabled - your friend gets an independent copy of the gadget, as before," the Google Engineer wrote.

As you probably expect, the sharing process is still made through the "Share this gadget" option included in under the gadget settings menu. The only difference is that, after selecting the contact list for sharing the gadget, you also have to check a new box, namely "View and edit my content."

"Decide whether you want to let your friends edit your gadget content or just view it on their iGoogle page and click "Send invites". Your friends will get an email from you and they will be able to see a preview of the gadget in the email and add it to their own iGoogle page," Jeff Regan explained the improvement.