San Francisco — You are now trapped in the weird web of widgets — get ready to spend lengthy hours on your iGoogle home page, the Big G is about to social it up. Google on Wednesday added a social-networking capabilities to its iGoogle customizable home-page service by introducing software “gadgets” that will enable users keep in tune with friends online as well as share YouTube videos, play Scrabble and maintain joint to-do lists.
The company on Wednesday announced that gadgets for iGoogle can now reap the benefits of the “Open Social API” to develop social-networking features into the small little software programs that iGoogle users can use to customize their home pages, according to Marissa Mayer, vice president for search products and experience. For example, gadgets will now be available for Flickr, YouTube, and social games like Scrabble.
Google has also introduced two latest attributes called “Friends Group” and “Updates” as part of a larger roll out today of new social features for users of its home page.
The search engine giant said the US debuts on iGoogle of 19 community-oriented mini-programs that includes chess and trivia game play and firing off updates about one’s life.
“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,” Mayer and iGoogle product manager Rose Yao said in a joint message posted online.
“Your friends are able to see what you share or do in your social gadgets either by having the same gadgets on their home-pages, or through a new feed called Updates.”
People using iGoogle can create a “Friends” group to assign who they want to share digital data with.
The new iGoogle Open Social gadgets let you keep track of what your friends are up to online. (Credit: Google)
With the updated attributes, Google enables users to share their activities with other friends — and it is thus jumping with two feet into the territorial war going on between Facebook and Twitter.
For example, friends who are iGoogle users can share YouTube videos that will appear automatically on the iGoogle home screen if you choose to embed that gadget on your home page. You can also access a “stream” of updates and see all the different types of content your friends have shared recently.
With this new social dimension, it seems iGoogle is extending its boundaries into the realm of social-networking sites like Facebook.
“The Google homepage has always been a place that connects people to information, and we are excited to now also be a place that connects people to each other,” Mayer said in their message.
“We hope these social gadgets make iGoogle an even more fun and personal homepage for you.”
There are over 60,000 mini-applications in a gadget directory that can be used to customize iGoogle home-pages with hip, playful, or functional programs, according to the California-based Internet Goliath.
The addition of social gadgets comes as Google competes for people’s online time with social-networking services Facebook and MySpace and micro-blogging sensation Twitter.
Without being more precise, Mayer said “tens of millions” of people have iGoogle home-pages. This could be a very quick way for Google to make a quick shot across the bow of Facebook.
Starting with some testing in Australia, Google is slowly rolling out new features to its iGoogle home-page that are going to make the page a much cooler place to hang out and socialize with your friends.
According to The Official Google Blog, users in other countries should start seeing the information about adding the social gadgets in the next week or so, and once you start seeing them, you can begin building yet another social graph for yourself.
Here is the video describing some of the new features: