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 some initial thoughts from my 50 or so minutes with the Wave team and hands-on experience with Wave:

It’s an exciting — possibly breakthrough — product that eludes simple categorization. Wave does lots of things and has the potential to do many more. However, there’s almost a “cultural” adaptation necessitated by it. People have to get used to communicating in a kind of “layered” way that Wave both allows and almost requires.

The screenshot above, from our Wave demo, looks a lot like an email client. But Wave permits multiple people to interact in real-time with each other. It’s a mix of email and IM with some Twitter and iGoogle thrown in. Speaking of the latter, Wave will spawn a developer ecosystem and permits existing Google Gadgets and the new social gadgets to work within it. In other words, developers can build apps and users can access or import them within the platform and individual waves (conversations).

There’s also drag and drop photo sharing. One cool related feature allows full-screen slideshows of images added by any user participating in a wave. (Yahoo has been taking incremental steps toward something more like this with its series of Yahoo Mail upgrades.)

Wave can also act as a Twitter client or embed Twitter clients (and one would assume eventually Facebook too). One could also imagine it as a feed reader for news. Indeed, third party developer efforts will enable Wave to grow and change, built around basic functionality of real-time communication and collaboration. One could easily imagine Google Voice and Google Talk integration into Wave, and so on.

It may be premature to discuss this, but a key to the mainstream appeal and adoption of Wave will be its ability to incorporate existing email accounts and to function as a client for traditional email.

During the demo most of the emphasis had been on enterprise or B2B collaboration. It struck me that teens would recognize this as a social tool and potential successor to IM — and would take to it accordingly. I made a comment along those lines and Google’s Rasmussen conveyed an anecdote about a test with Sydney (Australia) 3rd graders who used Wave and apparently had a great deal of fun with it.

That’s saying something if both developers and 3rd graders can equally use it. However, as Wave rolls out and more people are exposed, more of its potential and an expanding list of scenarios and use cases will likely emerge.

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 Facebook — that allow iGoogle users to play with one another. There’s photo sharing, featuring Picasa and Flickr, and a to-dos gadget, which allows you to share your list or created a combined list with others. In some cases, there will be Twitter-like activity streams (see “Timeline” below) that display updates to all participating users in real-time.

Here are some screenshots provided by Google:

These social gadgets would seem to owe something to both Facebook and Twitter but they also represent a logical evolution of the iGoogle product and gadgets platform more broadly. The personalized homepage has “tens of millions of users,” according to Mayer. It was until recently also the fastest growing product at Google. Making it “social” will likely generate further growth.

I asked whether social gadgets would make an appearance on Google Maps. I was told no but the Maps API permits developers to build social gadgets for iGoogle using Maps. Google is also thinking about extending this into mobile but that will take longer because of technical challenges and constraints in the mobile browser.

I also asked about Google Wave and whether there would be any crossover. Mayer said that she thought there would be some collaboration between the teams.

What’s fascinating to me is that Google has gone from a company that a few of years ago failed to fully appreciate how big social networking would become to one that done “a 180″ and fully embraced community. Google offers a social layer — as with the introduction of social gadgets — across many of its services. Latitude in Google Maps in another obvious example, but there are numerous others.

We don’t yet know how successful social gadgets will be. However, in a best-case scenario, it could potentially become the missing “social center” that has not taken root through other Google services including Orkut, Google’s actual social network.

In addition, if one steps back and imagines a rich ecosystem of gadget developers and engaged users, down the line, one can see iGoogle evolving into a Facebook-like experience featuring community, apps, status updates and so on.

I don’t mean to suggest that iGoogle will challenge Facebook (it won’t) or that anyone else is thinking along these lines exactly. But there’s an interesting, potential parallel if social gadgets really take off and iGoogle evolves into a new social media platform.

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. Yahoo also turned Yahoo Buzz into a Digg clone and I don’t believe it has caught on as Yahoo might have hoped.

Here is how Google describes this gadget:

The What’s Popular gadget by Google helps you discover interesting items from all over the Internet.

How we find interesting stuff What’s Popular uses algorithms to find interesting content from a combination of your submissions and trends in aggregated user activity across a variety of Google services, like YouTube and Google Reader.

Ratings You can rate items that you like or dislike by clicking the ratings buttons next to each item. If you change your mind, you can change your rating at anytime. The What’s Popular gadget looks at what users liked or disliked to improve its ranking of interesting items.

Add a URL Tell What’s Popular about interesting items you have found! If they become popular, they may rise to the top of our list! You can submit an item with or without attribution to yourself and preview your submission before you post. If you decide to associate your username with your submission you’ll be able to edit its title and description. The items you submitted can be found in the “My adds” area, where you can remove your name if you change your mind.

Terms of Service and Privacy What’s Popular is governed by the Google Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Users who repeatedly submit bad content to What’s Popular may have their rating and adding privileges temporarily suspended. Please go here for issues relating to copyright. All other violations of our terms of use can be reported through the report abuse links.

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, and get code that will quickly allow them to add those features to their sites. Those include “registration, invitations, member galleries, message posting, reviews, as well as third-party applications built by the OpenSocial developer community.” Google said that they’re starting with a core group of social gadgets but developers are expected to build out a wide array of gadgets over time. And with a few tweaks, any application currently built on or compatible with the OpenSocial platform can be modified to work with Friend Connect.

While OpenSocial works with a range of high-traffic sites and networks, Friend Connect will help push related applications out to smaller publishers and the so-called “long tail.” There’s no hidden monetization scheme or even options available to publishers using Friend Connect. It’s possible that Google Gadget Ads could be made available to publishers in a parallel gallery over time. (But I actually suggested this during the call with Google, not the other way around.)

Now back to data portability: Friend Connect will allow me to sign in using OpenID, and I can invite contacts from my various networks to join me on Friend Connect-adopting sites. In addition, users’ activities on Friend Connect sites can also be shown in news feeds on their other networks.

Site owners using Friend Connect get to see some but not all user data. And unless users affirmatively allow it, owners won’t necessarily be able to communicate directly with Friend Connect gadget users on their sites. Larger publishers may be less likely to go for Friend Connect for these reasons. They will likely want to “own” users and their data more directly. However, using Friend Connect doesn’t preclude site owners from having direct relationships with Friend Connect gadget users on their sites.

Google says it developed Friend Connect “to lower two barriers to the spread of social features across the web. First, many website owners want to add features that enable their visitors to do things with their friends, but the technology and resource hurdles have been too high. Second, people are tiring of needing to create new logins and profiles and recreate their friends lists wherever they go on the web. Google Friend Connect offers a solution to both of these issues.”

Since the site/wizard isn’t live yet (neither are example sites), here are a couple of screenshots provided by Google. The second one illustrates how FriendConnect social gadgets may look on sites:

Collectively, the various data portability initiatives, as well as efforts like Friend Connect, which make it easier to integrate social features into sites, are helping transform the broader Internet from a publishers’-centric model (i.e., “walled garden”) into something more fluid and permeable.

Postscript: Some sites using FriendConnect are now live.

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 also made a Sphinn Facebook Application that you can add to your Facebook profile.

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 shows up in the dock area of the Dashboard:

(5) You can remove it by clicking on the circle-X at the left bottom corner when Dashboard is active. Then clicking on the circle-X at the top left of the Google Gadget, as so:

For more on Google Gadget for Mac’s Dashboard, visit: http://desktop.google.com/mac/

Note: Google pushed back the launch of this until tomorrow noon (11/29).

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 or developed ourselves," said Sep Kamvar, who leads personalization engineering at Google. "We wanted to incent developers, and one of the things we had been thinking about was to create an ecosystem so people would invest in their gadgets because it was profitable."

Explaining further, Kamvar said:

"AdSense allowed lots of people to quit their jobs and make money from it. We want to make the same economic ecosystem for gadget developers. Our main goal here is to bootstrap an ecosystem where lots of gadget developers can spend time doing what they love, doing great things with their gadgets and make money from them."

Grants of $5,000 are the first level of support available to developers. Those that have built gadgets listed in the Google Gadget directory which get at least 250,000 weekly pageviews are eligible to apply. The process involves a one-page proposal explaining how they would use the grant to improve their gadget.

Those who successfully earn the first level of support can then go on to the higher level of funding — $100,000 in seed investment. This is designed for the gadget developer with a business plan on how a gadget can actually earn money. The $100,000 investment from Google is meant to help kickstart the development. As explained, it is only available to those developers that have first proven their worth by winning an initial grant.

Though the larger grant is billed as an investment, Google said the intent was to structure the funding in a way to encourage product development, rather than to be a way for Google itself to earn money off investing in potentially lucrative gadgets.

"The payoff for us is in more pageviews and users. By getting more users, we get more searches," said Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search products and user experience.

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 that gadget, when the user figure snapshot was taken (this is done twice per week, normally on Mondays and Thursdays, Google told me). This means there are actually more people than reported using a particular gadget, since cookies can make gadgets appear on the iGoogle personalized homepage even for users who are not logged in. In addition, gadget usage outside of Google itself is not counted.

Pageview figures continue to be reported on a weekly basis.

What’s the most popular gadget? Right now, you can’t tell easily based on pure user or pageview numbers (though for pageview popularity, Niall Kennedy did some crawling to come up with a customized list back in April). Selecting the Popular category, for example, does not sort gadgets there by most used or the ones with the most pageviews. Instead, sorting is currently done using an algorithm that ranks how often a gadget is added to Google personalized home pages in relation to its overall age and other factors.

This might change in the future, as Google is considering a revamp of the content directory, they told me.

By the way, while I’ve been talking about gadgets, the directory actually lists both gadgets (such as the PacMan game) as well as feed content (such as our own Search Engine Land feed module, shown below), which means you can get user figures even for feeds:

Keep in mind that Google Reader reports subscriber figures for feeds. I think these are different (and probably higher) than the new gadget user figures being shown. I’m checking on this.

Thinking you need to be in that directory? Google provides a guide for developers here, or you can use one of the very basic gadget templates here, or take the easy option of opening an iGoogle account, then using the "Add by URL" link next to the Search Homepage Content button at the top of the content directory. At the moment, I believe that’s what gets you into the directory eventually (again, I’m checking on this).

Wondering if you’re already listed? Search for your exact feed URL, and that should bring up your module within the directory (here’s how it works for Search Engine Land).

Postscript: Some answers to follow-up questions:

We automatically add feeds once they cross a minimal popularity threshold, but right now do not have other mechanisms for adding feeds. The best way to get listed is to encourage people to add the feed to their page (through the "add to google" button, for example). There is a formal mechanism for submitting gadgets to the directory, available at www.google.com/ig/submit.

Re: subscriber numbers, you are correct. The counts listed in the iGoogle directory do not include Google Reader. Feedfetcher reports the sum of Google Reader and iGoogle subscriptions.

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.