• iGoogle Releases Social Gadgets

    Wednesday, August 12th, 2009

    J. Michael Arrington (born March 13, 1970 in Huntington Beach, California) is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of TechCrunch, a blog covering startups and technology news. Arrington attended Claremont McKenna College (BA Economics, 1992) and Stanford Law School (JD, 1995) and practiced as a corporate and securities lawyer at two law firms: O’Melveny & Myers and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich... → Learn More

    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




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