14 DAY TRIAL // Google has been actively promoting its customized homepage iGoogle since it was launched in 2005 and, while it’s actually pretty popular in terms of traffic, it isn't exactly the search giant's best-known product. Still, the company is hammering on and now it has introduced a set of new social gadgets for the personalized homepage so users can share the experience of checking out the weather – new in the US at least, as similar gadgets were released for iGoogle Australia last week.
“[W]e're excited to introduce social gadgets for iGoogle. Social gadgets let you share, collaborate and play games with your friends on top of all the things you can already do on your homepage. The 19 social gadgets we're debuting today offer many new ways to make your homepage more useful and fun,” Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience, and Rose Yao, iGoogle product manager, wrote. “Your friends are able to see what you share or do in your social gadgets either by having the same gadgets on their homepages, or through a new feed called Updates.”
Well, actually, a social weather gadget isn't being released yet but there are some other interesting gadgets from several categories. There's half a dozen game gadgets like Playfish's Who has the biggest brain, EA Scrable, Chess, Trivia and others. Nothing revolutionary and nothing users haven't seen before but they're good for some solid time wasting.
But it's not all fun and games; there are more serious gadgets like the “social-aware” ones from news outlets like NPR and the Huffington Post, which let users share the stories they like or find interesting. The New York Times also has a new gadget but it's, in fact, a crosswords game. Also in the media-sharing category is a YouTube gadget that lets users share videos and make comments.
The most interesting gadget though is the Update, which is a stripped-down mash up of Twitter and Facebook's news feeds. Considering Twitter's already spartan interface, that's saying something. Anything users share shows up in the updates, stories, YouTube videos, Picasa and Flickr photos etc., but there is also the possibility to post a status update. This latest feature is actually the one that gives iGoogle real social features and turns it into an actual social network though one a bit short on features.
And if you're wondering who you are going to share all of this new content with, the search giant has created a separate Friends group just for iGoogle. This isn't the same as Google Contacts, though if you have a Friends group in Contacts you can easily share with them too. All of the basics are there, and iGoogle certainly has the traffic to make it work – 25 million monthly users in the US – but if there's anything Dr. Frankenstein taught us it's that just putting together all the different components doesn't necessarily a human social network make.