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.”

That sounds pretty arbitrary, and that it could lead to a lot of developers complaining that their apps aren’t really slow, but are labeled as such. But we all know how much Google loves speed, so this move isn’t all that surprising.

To make sure your gadget doesn’t get the Scarlett Letter, check out these optimization tips from Google.

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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

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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.

iGoogle also recently added video game themes, more social gadgets and may be releasing a new, more social version.

Martha Stewart’s iGoogle page is featured above.

Here’s Ashton Kutcher’s iGoogle homepage:

And here’s Donald Trump’s home page:

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It’s worth noting that 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.

Where such an Updates area resides will be extremely important. I’d guess it will be on your Google Profile, but there needs to be a centralized place for a full contact stream as well — or centralized places. Maybe Google will simply make another widget for all of your contacts’ updates to place on your iGoogle homepage or maybe even in Gmail. That seems like a smart play as it would be taking on Facebook by doing something slightly different than what Facebook is doing — allowing you to choose the area you wish to view the social stream. There would only be a walled garden insomuch as Google itself is a walled garden — a giant walled garden that encircles most of the web. Of course, Facebook is attempting to at least somewhat do this as well by opening its data stream outside of its walls.

I’ve made my distaste for some of Google’s social stumbles very clear. But, if this screenshot is legit, it shows a broader picture that is starting to make some sense. The real question now will be if Google will be able to keep all of this relatively complex tangle of social elements (and the underlying social relationships) simple enough for any user to grasp. Facebook had been really good at that, but it’s getting more complicated. Keep it simple, Google — and it just may pay off.

Update: The iGoogle Developer site has a FAQ which answers more questions about the impending social features.

Here’s the key section:

Who are friends in iGoogle?

For development purposes, you can add friends through the friends manager gadget included with the developer tools. You can only share activities with other friends who have access to the developer sandbox. This is not the final network that will be used in iGoogle. Users will have full control over who their friends are and will be able to easily modify their list of friends. Stay tuned for details.
Profiles

What are profiles in iGoogle?

For development purposes, you can modify your profile data (displayname and thumbnail) using the profile gadget included with the developer tools. This is not the final profile or data that will be used in iGoogle. Stay tuned for details.
Updates gadget

How often can a gadget post an activity to the Updates gadget?

A gadget can post up to 5 activities per user per day. For gadget development and testing purposes, these limits are not implemented in the sandbox. Posting activities requires explicit permission from the user granted during the installation of a social gadget.

And here’s another screenshot:

[thanks David]

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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. MyAlltop only lets you grab feeds that are already on Alltop, so no custom widgets for you (tough luck if you wanted to insert your mom’s blog). Furthermore, Alltop doesn’t have a decent search function, which makes it very hard to look for sources to add unless I’m 100% certain they will be in a specific category. With 31,000 sources in 550 topics, they’re hurting themselves not to make search a priority instead of launching new features like MyAlltop.

For example, I can’t find our sister site MobileCrunch anywhere on Alltop (not even in the Mobile category), so that pretty much blocks me from creating a public TechCrunch presence on Alltop with all our feeds in it. All I could do at this point is notify Alltop that there’s a great resource on all things mobile missing in the pre-defined category list of feeds and hope that they add it. Personalization it ain’t.

You could of course claim that Alltop takes the hassle out of having to locate the RSS feeds of your favorite sources and go through a few steps in order to add them to any personalized feed reader, but how much of a problem is this really? I think it’s a bit of a stretch to claim MyAlltop simplifies creating a custom feed reader because it already has been dead simple for many years. In my opinion, anyone who thinks the process of personalizing your RSS feed reading experience with Netvibes or iGoogle is cumbersome will probably feel the same way after trying MyAlltop.

Here’s a video about Alltop (the new feature is explained a bit in the end):

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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.

Perhaps Google is now ready to socialize iGoogle gagdets more broadly. Combined with its recent changes to allow for wider canvas pages for each app, iGoogle itself might be taking on more of the trappings of a social network. All it needs is a buddy list and activity feed.

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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:

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New features in this release include:

• More modules from content providers (New York Times, WSJ, etc.)
• More modules that integrate content from other parts of Yahoo’s network (Flickr photos, Calendar, Movie Showtimes)
• Better support for Third party email (Gmail, POP) and other services (Netflix and Facebook)
• More layout options, tabbed browsing, other navigational improvements

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.

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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.

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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.

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