Social gadgets let you share, collaborate and play games with your friends on top of all the things you can already do on your homepage. The 19 social gadgets we’re debuting [...]]]> Google announced some major changes yesterday to its iGoogle site. Social gadgets are embedded widgets which connect you to other iGoogle users in social settings:

Social gadgets let you share, collaborate and play games with your friends on top of all the things you can already do on your homepage. The 19 social gadgets we’re debuting today offer many new ways to make your homepage more useful and fun. If you’re a gaming fanatic, compete with others in Who has the biggest brain? or challenge your fellow Chess or Scrabble enthusiasts to a quick match. Stay tuned in to the latest buzz with media-sharing gadgets from NPR, The Huffington Post, and YouTube. To manage your day-to-day more efficiently, check things off alongside your friends with the social To-Do list gadget.

In case you are wondering how Google intends to scale-up a widget gallery with all of its cost-cutting and tightening of the ROI belt, its blog entry outlines its growth strategy:

It’s developers who have really made iGoogle into the rich experience it is — growing our gadget directory to over 60,000 gadgets today — and we know iGoogle developers will help us quickly expand our collection of social gadgets.

In other words, it is going to follow in the rich tradition of Facebook and iPhone apps by giving developers an open API in which to design away.

For those who remember, it was the temptation to provide its users with richer content choices that led Yahoo astray a decade ago. Now it appears that Google is on the same slippery slope. So far, its homepage has remained more-or-less pure and free from clutter, but as more users switch over to iGoogle from its traditional, minimalist search page, Google will have to find a balance between content and search.

Social apps are already live for Australian iGoogle users and US users will be migrated over the next few weeks. Here’s Google’s video on the subject of social apps:

via Official Google Blog: I scream, you scream, we all scream for iGoogle social!.

Think someone has a chip on his shoulder about, um, not being [...]]]>

“We are not a widget company. We are a distributed media company,” says Ro Choy, chief revenue officer at Rock You. “The reality of our company is that we were not a widget company. We make money through our relationships with advertisers and partners.”

Think someone has a chip on his shoulder about, um, not being a widget company?

In reality, this piece could have been re-titled as: Internet Start-Ups No Longer Able to get Funding on Vague Plans of Getting Ad Revenue.

via Internet Start-Ups Diversify Their Business Models – WSJ.com.