Hmmmm….I wonder where they came up with this idea….
Google announced that “to kick off the summer season,” it has launched a new collection of nature themes for iGoogle, its personalized home page service.
Why should location-based social networks be worried about Google? Because its new Latitude product was able to gain over a million users in just a week, Google’s vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra told an audience at the Mobile World Congress today.
I’m imagining a world where each of us, and all groups, networks, enterprises, institutions, agencies and NGOs, have dashboards which are associated with our online presence. Some of these dashboards exist today in the guise of “NetVibes” start-up pages or as iGoogle and My Yahoo pages.
If you love something, set it free. Then, if you’re lucky, maybe you can figure out a way to make money with it. Despite what appears to be a vocal minority that is unhappy with the changes, that’s what Google may have finally been able to do with the redesign of its popular iGoogle start page.
Social networks like Facebook and MySpace are often just one click of a bookmark away on users’ Web browsers. Google looks to be one-upping them by turning its personalized home page, iGoogle, into a social network of sorts. With the new developer sandbox for iGoogle, Google is offering hints of what could be a very grand scheme. The video Google has released is front-loaded with what seem to be routine updates for what developers can do with iGoogle. However, toward the end we’re hit with code for accessing friends’ data and yes, creating an all important (in this day and age of social networks), friends’ activity stream.
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