iGoogle, a personalized homepage that competes with My Yahoo, My MSN, My AOL, Netvibes and others, will release 19 new in-house and third party iGoogle widgets today that add new social and sharing features to users of the service. An overview of the service is in the video below, and a tour of some of the features and gadgets is here.
In an interview yesterday, Google VP Marissa Mayer and iGoogle Product Manager Rose Yao said they hope to engage users with social games and sharing with friends. We then played a quick game of Scrabble on iGoogle.
We saw some early tests of social gadgets from Google earlier this year.
This is the latest enhancement to iGoogle, which Google launched in 2005 and has been pushing as an alternative home page by periodically promoting it on Google.com. According to the latest Comscore stats, they still trail Yahoo’s 44 million monthly visitors – iGoogle is second with 25 million monthly visitors, followed by My MSN with 4.6 million and Netvibes (which has tried its own social platform) with 1.3 million. Things haven’t changed all that much from 18 months ago. There are a total of 60,000 or so gadgets available on iGoogle today.
The available Gadgets:
3rd party gadgets
Access Hollywood – Celebs by Access Hollywood
Chess.com – Chess
EA – SCRABBLE
Flixster – Flixster Movies
GoComics – GoComics
Huffington Post – The Huffington Post
Labpixies – Flood-It!
Labpixies – To-do
Labpixies – Trivia
NPR – NPR News, Music, Daily Quiz
NYT – NY Times Crossword
Playfish – WHO HAS THE BIGGEST BRAIN?
Tarot.com – Today’s Horoscope
TVGuide
Google gadgets
Captions
Social Photos
Tile Game
Timeline
YouTube
Very cool. I flock towards official Google releases (eg. widgets/apps) rather than the 3rd party ones. Hopefully some goodies in there.
… and you can use these gadgets on your http://favtabs.com pages as well.
I was under the impression that these kinds of things were already possible on iGoogle. Is this just a publicity move?
First off, I can’t see this in my iGoogle. Am I missing something?
Second, you reference 19 gadgets but list 18. What gives?
Not too impressed at this point in either regard.
This is really a great review!
This gives enough ideas about the posted topic which became a very interesting post to read on.
Thanks for posting!
Just a matter of time, I think, before iGoogle is like an “open” version of facebook….all they need to add is a status update field, and an easy way to create a merged stream of friends’ facebook posts, tweets, etc.
Seriously why do you want to crowd your homepage like this?, i am fine with the regular Google.com
iGoogle is extremely slow – to the extent that it’s totally useless. That’s why killed MySpace and gave Facebook the opportunity – speed.
Go PHP!
Scrabble + iGoogle = lots of opportunities to waste time!
Can’t access the ’settings’ on Scrabble?
Way to hold google to the same standard as all the other companies you work with!
Yeah, this looks good but they won’t work (I’ve tried a few) for me – keep getting a message about the OpenSocial feature not enabled at my location, which is San Francisco. Maybe they’ll come on line later.
I don’t understand how people can use iGoogle, it has to be one of the worst designed paes out there.
Yeah, so Google launched the OpenSocial version of iGoogle in Australia – the continent they refer to as “beta” – last week. Today they are rolling (i.e. not all at once) it out in the US.
I think if you go to http://google.com/igsocial and add one of the gadgets from there – preferrably the GoComics gadget – it may kick you over to the social version of iGoogle.
The article failed to inform us that this is not rolled out to the all US users yet and we all kept wasting time wondering why we don’t see what we’re supposed to see.
I’ve been told that the OpenSocial features of iGoogle will be fully rolled out by the end of the 13th in the US. As far as I know, it’s only in Australia and the US.
Britain’s container was recently updated (they now have canvas view), but I haven’t been informed on whether or not they will get OpenSocial any time soon.
Its nice to see OpenSocial getting more attention, with this and the announced “Ning Apps” for September ( http://blog.nin...er.html#comment ), it might be a nice second chance for the standard to finally catch up.
I wonder if Facebook will ever support them… although I don’t use their site, I know a lot of people do.
Was this implemented using their Wave gadget technology?
So are these are OpenSocial applications that will be able to be used on Ning and other OpenSocial social networks as well?
looks like it, yes, see the developer page:
http://code.goo...m/apis/igoogle/
nice!!!
The EA Scrabble gadget wasn’t working, and then it looked like EA had pulled it. Does anyone else see it in the search results?
woah, awesome!
i love my igoogle, keep up the amazing work!
It’s very useful for someone, but not for me.
very cool gadgets! definitely see myself wasting productivity on these games…. heh.
The scrabble is much cleaner and faster than the facebook one. nice!
US Account using a computer in Spain:
Google Chrome 3.0.197.11: FAIL
Firefox 3.5.2: Success
Great job guys! Who do you think you are MSFT?
Good news!
I take this opportunity to point out this open source platform similar to iGoogle
Someone might have an interest in having a similar platform in a intranet
http://taolin.fbk.eu
it’s open source software: anyone can participate in the development
Suggestions are welcome!
omg that’s fn sweet!
Awesome job team!