On its iGoogle Developer Blog today Google issued a warning to developers: Optimize your gadgets for speed, or we’re labeling them as “slow” in the directory.
Starting in late September, Google says that any widget that doesn’t meet a speed requirement, will get a nice “slow” badge attached to its directory listing. The only detail it gives about the requirement is that it will get the badge if it’s “slow enough to cause speed-related user dissatisfaction.“
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.
We saw some early tests of social gadgets from Google earlier this year.
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.
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.
Twitter’s not the only social platform to have a celebrity fetish. Google is bringing out its inner obsession with celeb users by launching iGoogle Showcase, which allows you to see and share the homepages of your favorite celebs. The current site showcases iGoogle homepages from celebs such as Rachael Ray, Al Gore, and Katie Couric. The showcase also highlights web celebs like Kevin Rose, Arianna Huffington, and Seth Godin.
The iGoogle Showcase lets you copy your favorite celeb’s iGoogle page to your own, or browse through the collection and choose different gadgets and themes to include from varying pages. Some celebs have created customized gadgets that you can embed. For example, Ryan Seacrest’s gadget lets you keep up with all the latest entertainment news. Donald Trump’s gadget offers advice to entrepreneurs, Martha Stewart shares recipes and tips, and Anderson Cooper delivers headline news and extras from his CNN show AC360.
We just received a screenshot of an iGoogle page, that appears to show a couple interesting new elements of Google’s ever-evolving social blanket. The screenshot supposedly comes from the developer sandbox version of iGoogle (where it tests out new features), and shows options to socially integrate Google widgets. The one shown in the image below is the Google Finance widget, which apparently will be able to access your Google Contacts and place its activity in something called “Updates.”
It’s worth noting tate Google just recently rolled out a version of Google Contacts that is wholly separate from Gmail. Why a Google Finance widget would need to access that data, I’m not sure. Perhaps it has some kind of easy-to-use “share this with” functionality. Or more specifically, as our tipster notes, that data may be be used to filter who you share something with in your social sphere. But the more interesting element is the posting to the Updates area. One would have to imagine that this will be a river of information similar to Facebook’s News Feed, that will pipe in new information from you when you update something.
Alltop, the “online magazine rack” that offers visitors a clean overview of RSS-feed enabled sources categorized by topic, is launching version 3.0 today with the addition of a custom feed reader that’s supposed to make it easier for users to personalize their user experience when browsing for online news. But how personalized is it really?
The feature, dubbed MyAlltop, lets users create a custom page with a so-called vanity URL (e.g. my.alltop.com/techcrunch) where they can add feeds from a variety of topics and display all the widgets on one page, which can then be shared with others. All users need to do is register and add feeds to their public pages by clicking a small plus sign displayed next to feed widgets.
I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right. Personalized start pages like Netvibes, iGoogle, PageFlakes, etc. have been around for years, and they pretty much all offer the above and much more.
New social features are popping up in iGoogle gadgets, those apps you can add to your personalized Google homepage. For instance, the My Google Book Search Library gadget, which lets you search books and create a personal digital library, now asks people who have OpenSocial profiles if they want to allow the gadget to “know who I am and access my profile” and “post updates to my Friends group.” This appears to be done through Google Friend Connect. A source sent us the screenshot at left, so this could very well just be bucket testing on the part of Google.
But it makes sense. Google has been pushing Friend Connect onto other Websites as a way for them to tap into this same profile data. Individual apps in the form of iGoogle gadgets can benefit just the same. Google has allowed developers to play around with adding social features to iGoogle gadgets since last April, treating them effectively as OpenSocial apps.
MySpace and Google demonstrated an interesting mashup of the MySpace Data Availability API, oAuth and the iGoogle gadget specification at the oAuth Summit a couple of weeks ago. The application, which pulls the core MySpace feature set into iGoogle, is not yet publicly available, although MySpace has said to expect in in August.
It’s another example of data portability in action (as well as the alliance between MySpace and Google to compete with Facebook). The example application MySpace has built for iGoogle is a gadget that allows MySpace users to check profile updates, their status messages and private messages – all from within the gadget. The gadget is built according to the new gadget spec, meaning that it should also work with other sites (such as Yahoo) that also support the gadget and oAuth.
These are the screen shots that were shown at the conference:
My Yahoo, the leading customized homepage provider, has finally rolled out its redesigned interface to all of its users. Yahoo has allowed users to upgrade to the new interface for over a year, but has taken its time in rolling it out to everyone.
New features in this release include:
The interface has been in need of a facelift for some time, as Yahoo has watched its userbase dwindle from 56.9 million users last November to 41.6 million in June. Comparatively, iGoogle has has seen increase from 23.8 users in November to 24.3 million unique visitors in May. Google performance isn’t exactly stellar, either (maybe iGoogle could use a refresh too), but at least it hasn’t been losing users. So where did My Yahoo’s 15 million lost users disappear to? We’re guessing Facebook, which has gone from 92.7 million visitors to 123.9 million in the same time period.
Also notable is Yahoo’s announcement that they intend to allow external developers to create their own applications and modules for use on My Yahoo, along with other parts of the Yahoo network.
It’s time for an update on the personalized homepage wars – Netvibes and Pageflakes tend to get most of the press attention, and they are certainly pushing the envelope and trying to find new ways to make their services useful to users. But those two services have less than 4% of the market for personalized homepages between them (I have emailed both companies to see if their internal stats match what we have below).
About a year ago I posted the visitor stats for the big players in this space – MyYahoo, iGoogle, MyMSN and MyAOL/MyNetscape. All of these services provide a drag and drop interface that allows users to put whatever content they like on their home page, through specialized modules or via RSS feeds. Most of them support third party widgets as well. At that time, Yahoo had significantly more visitors than all of the other services combined – 70% of the 72 million or so visitors to all of the sites combined. At the time, Netvibes and Pageflakes were not large enough to be tracked by Comscore. Now they are.
One thing to note on the data – it does not take into account duplications (where a user visits multiple of these sites, they are counted as users of all of the sites), so the numbers are really only to show relative size).
Based on January 2008 Comscore stats, Yahoo still leads the category, although they’ve dipped about 6% to 47 million monthly visitors. Their market share has dropped to 57%. Google, on the strength of homepage promotion of iGoogle, has tripled to 22 million monthly visitors, putting them in second place with 26% market share. MyMSN and MyAOL/MyNetscape are next, with 10% and 3.3% market share, respectively. Then, at the end, Netvibes and Pageflakes.
Not on the chart is GlobalGrind, a hip-hop centric personalized home page that launched in September 2007. They now have 144,000 monthly unique visitors of their own. Not bad for a site that’s less than six months old.
A total of $20 million or so in venture capital has gone into Pageflakes and Netvibes. But without a major portal or search engine to feed them new users, growth is going to continue to be hard v. the big guys. And since all the big portals already have their own products, they won’t be looking to acquire these startups unless they get a lot of users on their site. It’s going to be a long haul.
Spotted by Google Operating System is a new iPhone specific interface for Google’s personalized webpage product iGoogle. The page can accessed directly from http://google.com/ig/i, although iPhone users should be immediately redirected to this page when trying to access iGoogle.
The new iPhone interface is a step up from Google’s previous offering of a mobile specific page at google.com/m (our review here) which only offered limited customization options.
iGoogle for iPhone will compete with Netvibes, who launched their one iPhone specific version in August 2007.
First impressions: this is good. As someone who has long given in to the Google borg all the major services I use (email, RSS reader etc) are through Google, and now iGoogle will give me a start page that links into those service. Google fans will love this, however if you’re not a heavy Google user nothing to see here, move along.
