iGoogle | Social Gadgets
Social Gadgets is basically a load of add-ons that are designed to offer the functionality of Facebook on your IGoogle – transforming the page into a social space for doing stuff with friends. Current Gadgets include what you’d expect; status updates, photo sharing, live multi-player games and shared to-do lists etc.
iGoogle already has 60,000 gadgets, of which only 19 are social, so there’s little doubt about the potential for both for propriety and third-party apps. If iGoogle is taken seriously as a possible social network, then it’s easy to imagine an iPhone app-based explosion of Social Gadgets. On top of that iGoogle social gadgets enable gadget-by-gadget sharing, unlike Facebook’s all-or-nothing approach. Social Gadgets also offer functionality that means you can hang-out with all your friends while connecting to some friends with gadgets that other can’t see.
Google obviously wants a Facebook, which it may well have with the incoming Wave. Meanwhile the integration of Social Gadgets into iGoogle might be a viable alternative to (the recently ‘young-person’ retardant) Facebook.
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