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Did You Develop a Popular iGoogle Gadget?  (View post)

Jeremy [PersonRank 0]

Saturday, November 21, 2009
14 years ago5,081 views

The reason my google gadget is popular isn't because you can use it on igoogle, although you can, it is because you can use it on your website to use google translate. Since google started "google sites" it has been very popular. Many websites have it embedded which is the reason it is popular. If you want to know more reach me here http://alturl.com/xqpu

Jeremy [PersonRank 0]

14 years ago #

There are no tricks to make it popular except maybe time, how long it has been around, the only other trick is to make it useful. On second thought I guess I know a trick I saw used but didn't use myself. The annoying cheat trick which is better not shared since google doesn't seem to know it exists and it would get in the way of good gadgets if everyone knew it.

gadgets.pozzetti,it [PersonRank 0]

14 years ago #

depends on what you mean for "popular".

I developed the Google Services for hosted domains gadgets (for iGoogle and Sites and whatever). Few users (let's say 5000).

I have a site to collect changelog and comments but I do not receive much feedback.

Nick W [PersonRank 1]

14 years ago #

The reason my Google Voice gadget is popular is because Google didn't release an official GV voice with the release of their product. I 'cheated' and used a URL content type gadget with the GV mobile site. Google's forcing GV to use a secure connection now so it completely breaks the gadget when a non secure iGoogle link is used.

http://www.google.com/ig/directory?url=hosting.gmodules.com/ig/gadgets/file/103004048084238050439/GoogleVoice.xml

GeekLad [PersonRank 1]

14 years ago #

I've made a few gadgets, by far my most popular is my Web Definitions gadget:

http://www.google.com/ig/directory?type=gadgets&url=geeklad.com/downloads/web-definitions.xml

It one point it had over 100,000 users when I was hosting it on Google Pages. However, in the transition to moving it to my own host I lost about half of my users. :(

The way it became popular is rather amusing. Initially, I called the gadget "Google Dictionary". An iGoogle product manager contacted me and informed me that I was in violation of Google trademark with the name of my gadget.

He said that all I needed to do was to change the name of the gadget to remove Google from the name. He also said he would offer me free AdWords advertising for the gadget, so I was more than happy to oblige. I changed the name to Web Definitions, and my user base really started to ramp up when he turned on the AdWords.

Unfortunately, since the transition out of Google Pages, my user count has never been the same. :(I wrote up a few defects about it, but they said the gadget was not rendering for some users because of latency. They said the latency was likely caused due to the proximity of users to my host. I never really accepted this explanation, because my host machine is located in Texas, however, the majority of the users that were still able to render the gadget were located in the United Kingdom.

Sorry for the rant, but I thought I would tell the full story. :-D

Ryan [PersonRank 0]

14 years ago #

I had one of the original top 10 ones when it launched. The way I got it popular was to simply promote it on the website itself that was related to it.

That's all there was to it. I won't mention it though, since I sold the site and am no longer affiliated with it.

Matthew Pegler [PersonRank 2]

14 years ago #

I developed the original tabs modules back before Google had built in ones. I didn't do much advertising. Just word of mouth and getting featured on a bunch of blogs got me up to a couple million users.

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