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Monday, April 21, 2008

An iGoogle Preview With Friends Features, Expandable Views

The Google personalized homepage iGoogle is now available in a preview version for developers to play around with new features. You can log-in via the new iGoogle developer homepage by clicking on Getting Started. In the sandbox, you will be able to see a couple of new things:

Google’s preview image of the updates gadget:

Just like the release of OpenSocial, the new iGoogle sandbox right now feels more like a flaky alpha experiment for brave-of-heart developers rather than something useful. There are broken links in tutorials, character encoding issues, JavaScript bugs and more. But in the long run, perhaps Google is aiming to clone functionality provided by social tools like Facebook or Friendfeed. While other social services start with the network – profiles, defining friendships and so on – and then put applications on top, Google seems to go the other route by stacking the social network on top of their existing apps. This in turn causes confusion in some areas, like when it comes to defining who your “Google friends” are in the first place.

[Thanks Hebbet!]

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