At the end of next month, September 30, Google will expand the current "developer preview" of Google Wave to roughly 100,000 consumer users. According to Google, "included in this group of early testers will be some of the businesses using Google Apps." In anticipation of this wider release, Danny and I got some time with Lars Rasmussen and the rest of the Google Wave team the other day. By way of background, Danny and I wrote about Wave when it was first announced earlier this year and then offered some third-party developer observations. Without doing a full "review," I'll offer [...]

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This morning Google is rolling out a program in Australia enabling developers to create "social gadgets" that permit sharing, collaboration and groups on the iGoogle homepage. The social gadgets will come to the US and other markets in the future, but the timing is undetermined. I spoke yesterday with Google's Marissa Mayer about the new initiative, built on the Open Social platform. At the outset there are apparently 12 social gadgets, eight of which were created by third party developers. For example, there's a chess gadget and other casual game gadgets -- casual games have become huge on [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Google: Gadgets | Google: iGoogle | Google: Maps & Local | Google: Orkut | Top News

Steve Rubel reports that Google has released a new iGoogle Gadget named What's Popular. The gadget looks like a small little Digg clone to me. Here is a screen capture: As you can see, you can mark up or down a story and it shows the number of "pops" next to the story, plus when it was first added. You can even submit your own stories and keep track of your submissions and "my pops." If you maximize the gadget, you can further filter the stories. Here is a screen capture: I wonder if this will catch on? We remember when AOL turned Netscape into a Digg clone and it failed. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Google: Gadgets | Search Engines: Digg | Top News

Contrary to some earlier reports, Google's new Friend Connect, launching today, is not focused on data portability or a direct answer to MySpace "Data Availability" or the new Facebook Connect. While there's a data portability dimension, it's focused on the flip side of the equation: site owners who want to make their sites more "social." Accordingly, it's more like a Ning competitor. Right now Friend Connect is in a very limited beta with a few "white listed" sites. However, eventually, site owners will be able go to a wizard (available here later today), select "social gadgets" or modules, [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Facebook | Google: Gadgets | Google: OpenSocial

Patrick Sexton at SEOish created a Sphinn Google Gadget that you can add to your Google Personalized Home page. The Sphinn Google Gadget displays the most recent hot items at Sphinn, the what's new items, and also the most recent comments. To add the Sphinn Google Gadget to your Google home page, click here. After you click on that link, Google will take you to a confirmation page that looks like this: After you confirm by clicking "Add to Google," Google will take you to the Google home page with the gadget on your front page: Don't use Google's personalize home page? Well, Patrick [...]

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Google Gadgets can now run on Apple's Dashboard as a native Dashboard Widget. Now you can have the same Google Gadget on your iGoogle page and Google Desktop Sidebar as well as in your Apple Dashboard. From a developer's standpoint, now if you make a Google Gadget, that gadget can work easily on a Mac, without any extra code. Below is a walkthrough of me installing a Google Gadget directly on my Mac as a widget in Dashboard. (1) Load up the Google Gadgets application on your Mac: (2) Select a gadget and click add: (3) The Google Gadget then opens in Apple's Dashboard: (4) It also [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Mobile | Google: Gadgets

How do you help encourage the growth of a widgets or gadgets ecosystem? Being big is a good, natural start. It has helped people flock to develop Facebook applications or Yahoo Widgets or Google Gadgets, just for exposure to the traffic at these places. But Google wants to encourage with more than traffic. Now it's offering cold hard cash. Google Gadget Ventures is a new pilot program that will pay developers either $5,000 or $100,000 to create Google Gadgets that prove popular with users. "We've seen lots of people develop great applications for gadgets that we wouldn't have thought of [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Mobile | Google: Gadgets

Got a Google Gadget? Google's now reporting how many users make use of it, in addition to the pageviews figures it started posting earlier this year. The new user stats can be found via Google's Homepage Content Directory. There you'll see gadgets that can be added to your iGoogle personalized homepage, with the number of users shown directly under the gadget's name, as can be seen highlighted in the screenshot below: Click through to the gadget's home page, and you'll get both users and pageviews, such as shown below: Users are the number of logged-in Google users making use of th [...]

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Steve Rubel reports that Google Coop has added integration with Google Gadgets. For example, I subscribed to a weather subscribed link within the Google Coop and then did a search for weather 10901 and got this: You can also add gadgets such as time/date, translations and traffic. The technical specification for implementation is here. I am now thinking up ways to improve my Google Coop for the Search Engine Roundtable (which you should all subscribe to) to add useful gadgets. Any ideas, let me know. For more on how my coop works, see here and here. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Mobile | Google: Gadgets