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June 30, 2008

While quite popular in India and Brazil, Google's social network site Orkut has failed to find the same success in the U.S. With the launch of OpenSocial, an API for writing social gadgets, it was clear that iGoogle will play a more important role in its second attempt to socialize.

OpenSocial applications are iGoogle gadgets with a social component, and designed specifically for Web 2.0

Currently, Google claims that iGoogle has tens of million of users. About half of the users are from the U.S. and it was one of the fastest growing Google products in 2006 and for most of last year.

It's also the homepage for many Google users who want to personalize their experience by adding their favorite theme and/or some fresh new information from the Internet.

Overall, the new social component will not affect all the gadgets, so you'll still have gadgets for mail, weather or news, but some of the gadgets could share information with your friends.

There's also a new "canvas view" that will show an expanded version of the gadgets, an integration with Google profiles and a newsfeed that shows your friends' recent activities.

It is hoped that the social component of iGoogle won't be too prominently promoted and that users will still be able to continue using the personalized homepage without dealing with friend invitations and viral gadgets.

iGoogle will try to be the social connection between Google services, but this is a difficult mission for Google, a company that has never managed to build a successful social site, least not yet anyway.

Following orkut's example, iGoogle opened a test site for developers who write OpenSocial gadgets. The site is probably for the next iteration of iGoogle, the personalized homepage turned into a social network.

"Overall, the successful integration of OpenSocial with apps offers users an opportunity to enhance their content by incorporating social functionality.

For example, a books gadget could display what a user's friends are reading, allow users to request to borrow books from friends' libraries, and show users books that their friends recently rated.

As people share content with their other friends, gadgets will build a broad audience for distributing content and driving traffic, explains the new developer site for iGoogle gadgets.

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Source: Google.