As we previously reported, starting tomorrow Google will widen access to its innovative communications platform Wave, offering 100,000 new invitations to use the service. Many of these people in turn will be allowed to invite others to join as well, reminiscent of how GMail propagated. (It’s wise for Google to allow these new users to invite friends and family because you effectively can’t use Wave without contacts on the system.) Those who will gain full access tomorrow will apparently be developers, early users who provided feedback and some Google Apps customers.

My earlier blog post provided some initial “hands on” reactions to the service. It’s a powerful and flexible tool that defies easy categorization. As I said earlier this month:

[Wave] 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.

Accordingly Wave has huge potential, but people will definitely need to use and experiment with it before they understand and see its benefits. There’s a clear learning curve and some complexity surrounding the product; it’s not entirely intuitive. Wave probably also needs to incorporate email in order to go mainstream.

Google still considers Wave to be in “preview” as it works out kinks and bugs of one sort or another. As it releases Wave more broadly Google will gain considerable feedback, which should help it add features and refinements. Here’s the video demo of Google Wave in action from the I/O Developer event in May.

Google has more in its blog post this morning.

Postscript: There’s an already emerging developer ecosystem around Wave. These “extensions” (widgets, plug-ins) will make Wave’s value and use cases more obvious to new users and will speed adoption. For example, see the Ribbit extension for conference calls or 6 Rounds for video chat.

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.

Last week we first wrote about social gadgets rolling out in Australia. Marissa Mayer, whom I spoke with at the time, said the timing of a broader rollout was uncertain. Well it’s here today:

Your friends are able to see what you share or do in your social gadgets either by having the same gadgets on their homepages, or through a new feed called Updates. Updates can include your recently shared photo albums, your favorite comics strips, your travel plans for the weekend and more. To help you manage who you are sharing with, we’ve created a Friends group. You can add and edit friends in this group at any time. If you already have a Friends group within your Google Contacts, you’ll be able to easily share with those friends on iGoogle as well.

There are 19 currently available:

As I said previously, this effectively turns iGoogle into something of a social network (although that’s too strong a statement):

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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.

The Google Mobile Blog announced yet another shot at an optimized version of iGoogle for iPhone and Android devices. About six months ago, Google quietly dropped the iPhone optimized iGoogle, before that, they had an optimized version since January 2008.

After living without an iPhone/Android version of iGoogle for about six months, Google came out with a nice look for the new iGoogle mobile. Here is a look at it:

To try this out on your iPhone or Android device, go to to igoogle.com in your mobile browser and tap “Try the new Mobile iGoogle!”

Further coverage of this story at Techmeme.

I reported this morning at the Search Engine Roundtable that Google seems to have quietly dropped the iPhone version of the iGoogle page. The iPhone iGoogle page used to be at google.com/ig/i, but when iPhone users navigate to google.com/ig/i they are redirected to the standard mobile iGoogle page at google.com/m/ig.

Google said the reason they dropped the iPhone version was because they “want to ensure you’ll all see the same version” of the iGoogle mobile page. But Google made no official announcement on this change. I found this by viewing a thread where it seems like hundreds of iPhone users are upset with this change.

It seems like the change started on Thursday, and, as soon as it happened, many iPhone users began complaining. The large thread I pointed to above has 140 or so comments, but there are dozens of other threads about this change.

So, what is the big deal? Well, Google made a huge deal about having iPhone optimized sites for many of their services, including iGoogle. They have many Google optimized iPhone sites and have promoted them time and time again. So why drop iGoogle without an announcement?

The new iGoogle theme just launched, which adds “full canvas views for gadget and support for full feed reading.” In short, the new view places the tabs that you typically see at the top, under the search box, now on the left hand side. It then allows you to add gadgets that support canvas view, to the new iGoogle look, which gives some gadgets a higher usability factor.

Let me illustrate below:

Here is a before screen capture:

Here is an after screen capture (I don’t personally see the new iGoogle, so thank you Keri for sending this my way):

As you can see, it opens up the page more. You can really see the impact by looking at how this works with the Google Reader Gadget. The Google Reader blog has screen captures illustrating this.

For a full list of canvas view enabled gadgets, see this list. This should be rolled out to all U.S. users any time now and then worldwide in the near future.

Google Operating System reported that Google said they are launching the new iGoogle design, named “canvas view,” to a limited set of users. What is new in this version and design?

• Left-hand navigation with expandable tabs
• A canvas view for Google Gadgets, kind of looks like a Google Reader view (screen cap here)
• Google Chat added to iGoogle

Those are the major changes. To read about them in more detail, see this Google document.

iGoogle is one of the most interesting products at the search engine. Reportedly the fastest growing of Google’s offerings, it’s a personal start page or dashboard, but with potential to evolve into something more. Today Google announced “a sandbox for developers that helps them build richer gadgets for iGoogle, which will offer users more powerful and interactive features…”

The announcement also says, “iGoogle’s new features will include left navigation, a maximized or “canvas view” option for gadgets, and social features for gadgets using the OpenSocial APIs. These social features for gadgets will include a friends list and activities displayed through a special updates gadget.”

This starts to sound, as TechCrunch argues, a bit like a nascent social platform. Indeed, and Google generally has been “socializing” many of its applications.

As Marissa Mayer indicated in her recent interview with Danny (paraphrasing):

[Mayer] reiterated that the Orkut social networking site that Google runs remains strong worldwide. But she said that it might be that for the US and other key markets where it does not lead, the company might need to re-brand or build entirely new social networking services.

Thus Google might be watching iGoogle and potentially looking to that property to become the hub or focus of those new services. (It’s also in a potential position to be a kind of “meta-network” where newsfeeds and updates are consolidated.)

Google’s Webmaster Central is giving you a new way to access the diagnostics and stats for your sites. Rather than log into your Webmaster Tools account, you can add the Webmaster Tools gadget to your iGoogle page and access information from there. You can choose what components to display on your iGoogle page.

Below are details about what components are available and when each was initially launched as part of webmaster tools.

Available Webmaster Tools Components for iGoogle

• Crawl errors: the number of each type of crawl error Google found on the site (with links to the individual URLs with errors). Google has been sharing diagnostic information such as this since August 2005.
• Top search queries: the top searches that bring visitors to the site from Google. Google has been providing this information since November 2005.
• What Googlebot sees: the words used most often in the site. Google began providing this information in February 2006.
• External links: list of pages on your site with external links to them, along with the number of links to each page. You can click through to see the list of external URLs. Google first made link information available in webmaster tools last February.
• Internal links: alphabetical list of links from the site to other pages within the site. Google first made this information available at the same time it launched external linking data.
• Subscriber stats: the number of subscribers to each feed on your site via Google Reader and iGoogle. When Google launched this feature in September, we covered why these numbers may not match those reported by Feedburner.
• Sitelinks: the list of links and titles that Google has generated for the site. Google began providing this information in October.
• Content problems: any issues with missing, duplicate, or short titles or meta descriptions. Google began supplying this information as part of webmaster tools in December.

How to Add Webmaster Tools Information to iGoogle

To add any of these components:

1. Log in to your Google Webmaster Tools account, then click on a verified site.



2. From the Tools menu, click Gadgets.
3. Click Add an iGoogle Webmaster Tools Homepage.



4. Choose the components you want to add.

This gadget provides information on all sites in your account (not just the site you navigated to in order to add the gadget). A useful future feature would be the ability to show stats for different sites as different components of the iGoogle page or the ability to choose which site shows as default. Right now, the first site listed in your account appears initially, and you can view information for different sites via a drop-down menu. If an unverified site is the first site in your account (they are ordered alphabetically), then your iGoogle page simply shows a verification message by default.

Google tells me that you must be logged into your iGoogle page using the same account you’ve used to verify your sites in Webmaster Tools in order to see this information. Otherwise, you’ll simply see a link prompting you to verify.

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