Google gets more social with new iGoogle features
Get ready to spend a lot more time on your iGoogle home page, the Big G is about to social it up.
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. While you will have complete control over your sharing options inside of the iGoogle gadgets, this will be considered completely separate from anything else on Google that has sharing options. In other words, just because you share with someone in Google Reader, that doesn’t mean you have to share with them in the iGoogle apps, which can be annoying to add people again, but it was the wisest choice for the company. The new gadgets will allow you to invite people to share information with them, play games, collaborate on things like to-do lists and more.
While all of this sounds interesting, the company needs to come up with something quickly to fill the void that is about to be left by Facebook purchasing FriendFeed. It shouldn’t be hard to do, and then Google could quickly absorb the users that are going to be looking for a new home, and it also could go wider than FriendFeed ever dreamed possible due to the existing brand recognition. Since the company is inviting people to build apps, I wouldn’t be too surprised to see something very much like FriendFeed come out of this, and the timing could simply not be better. This could be a very quick way for Google to make a quick shot across the bow of Facebook.
Here is the video giving you the very quick run down of some of the features.
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