14 DAY TRIAL // The Mountain View-based company has just rolled out a developer sandbox for iGoogle in order to let them build more advanced gadgets for Google's personalized homepage using the OpenSocial APIs. This means that iGoogle makes now the first step into the social networking jungle, a special side of the industry in which Google is already present with another service. As you may know, the giant owns Orkut, a social networking service which is quite popular in Brazil and India, but less popular in other countries where Facebook and MySpace took the leadership.
Getting back to the iGoogle developer sandbox, the new release won't affect the registered members who still want to use the gadgets placed on their personalized homepage because, just like blogger Ionut Alex Chitu explains, "you still have gadgets for mail, weather or news, but some of the gadgets could share information with your friends."
According to the improved Google developers page, the iGoogle weather gadget has no less than 14.9 million users while the date & time gadget comes the second with 12.4 million users. The CNN gadget attracted "only" 10.8 million users while the "How to of the day" came the fourth with 10.6 million consumers.
"The integration of OpenSocial with gadgets gives you an opportunity to enhance your content for users by incorporating social features. For example, a books gadget could display what a user's friends are reading, allow users to request to borrow books from friends' libraries, and show users books that their friends recently rated. As users share content with their friends, your gadget will naturally build a broad audience for distributing content and driving traffic," Google explains on the developers page.
If you want to test the newly-open sandbox for iGoogle, click on this link and sign up.