Google’s new iGoogle upgrades smacks of Facebook. Read this:
we’re excited to introduce social gadgets for iGoogle. 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. The 19 social gadgets we’re debuting today offer many new ways to make your homepage more useful and fun. If you’re a gaming fanatic, compete with others in Who has the biggest brain? or challenge your fellow Chess or Scrabble enthusiasts to a quick match. Stay tuned in to the latest buzz with media-sharing gadgets from NPR, The Huffington Post, and YouTube. To manage your day-to-day more efficiently, check things off alongside your friends with the social To-Do list gadget. Your friends are able to see what you share or do in your social gadgets either by having the same gadgets on their homepages, or through a new feed called Updates. Updates can include your recently shared photo albums, your favorite comics strips, your travel plans for the weekend and more.
Updates, Status Updates, Tweets….whathaveya. It’s all the same play – a social platform for connecting to others. More:
It’s developers who have really made iGoogle into the rich experience it is — growing our gadget directory to over 60,000 gadgets today — and we know iGoogle developers will help us quickly expand our collection of social gadgets. You can get information about how to build social gadgets for iGoogle on our developer site: code.google.com/igoogle. We introduced these new social features recently to Australia users and are gradually rolling them out to users in the U.S. over the next week.
Developers developers developers developers….
Facebook, nothing, John.
Google is looking more and more like Yahoo! Cluttered homepage, finance, calendars, games, chat, etc.
http://games.yahoo.com/multiplayer-games
Google was special in the early days, specifically because it rejected all these things. Specifically because it said that by doing one thing really well (search) it would provide the best overall user experience.
Now they’re turning into everything that they once scorned?
here we go again, John! This is yet another “nothing” press release that will lead to nothing significant for Google. Not even worth the post. Sorry.
My colleague just made the point of comparing my iGoogle page to his classic Google page, side-by-side. I couldn’t argue with him. Clean and uncluttered is what I loved about Google’s home page from the start.