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Google Rolls Out Canvas Views for iGoogle Startpage

arnoldzafra — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 22:35:37 +0000

Google has just rolled out a new feature for its startpage iGoogle – the canvas views from some of its most popular gadgets and full reading views for feeds. For those not in the loop, Google Reader and iGoogle are almost the same product. Google Reader is a feed aggregator which also supports some Google gadgets, iGoogle is a startpage which also supports RSS feed reading. continued…

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iGoogle Getting Social, Adding FriendFeed Feature

nickoneill — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 14:03:09 +0000

Today Google announced the redesign of their highly popular iGoogle start page. The start page will have a FriendFeed like feed that shows shared feed items from your contacts in Google reader, their recent photos uploaded to Picasa, Google Talk status messages and shared iGoogle gadgets. Sound familiar? It’s pretty much the same thing as other social networks except that your homepage is your startpage for everything.

Google has reduced the newsfeed down to a single feature. Honestly, this makes a lot of sense and I could see Google being successful with this strategy. The only downfall to the new startpage? Well, it’s limited to Google owned items. Currently there is no way to import activities that your friends are involved in else where on the web.

One other substantial addition is the creation of canvas pages for Google gadgets. That means that Google gadgets function similarly to Facebook applications as well as the new Google Friend Connect canvas pages. It appears that the concept of canvas pages has become pervasive throughout the social web. While I don’t know how many users interact with iGoogle on a daily basis, I know it is in the millions.

That means Google has now developed a way to compete directly with Facebook and other social networks for the first page someone loads when they sit down at their computer.

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iGoogle Launches OpenSocial Sandbox

nickoneill — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 15:32:40 +0000

OpenSocial developers have just gained access to a whole new platform: iGoogle. iGoogle is the startpage for millions of users across the web. While it isn’t as robust as Facebook, the ability to distribute your application through more channels is always a good thing. The applications also include a canvas view that provides more space for applications in contrast to the standard widget-sized currently provided.

The canvas feature is a drastic change for start pages overall as widgets have become the standard. For me this means that we are witnessing the convergence of social applications as widgets. Once two distinct entities, widgets and social applications had separate roles. Now, widgets and social applications are rapidly becoming more ubiquitous and distribution channels are becoming more streamlined.

This means that developers can now reach more people with less effort. The only problem remaining is that lack of viral channels on iGoogle. A while back I contacted Tariq Krim, CEO of Netvibes, to suggest that they add social features to their startpage. At the time he didn’t understand my suggestion (could have been lost in translation) but in a matter of months, Netvibes enabled the sharing of startpage widgets across their platform.

Erick Schonfeld suggests that iGoogle may slowly become its own social network. That’s due to today’s addition of friend updates to the iGoogle homepage. The web is rapidly becoming more social and while all of these standards and features are a complete mess, soon enough much of this will hopefully become more straightforward and slowly we will see the centralization of social identity management on the web. For now, developers have another platform to play with. Check out the video below to learn more.

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