Google’s Latest Move as a Social Network

Last week, Google introduced social gadgets for iGoogle in Australia. Today they have made them available in the US. Well, they’ll be gradually rolling out starting today, anyway.

The social gadgets let users share, collaborate, and play games with their friends. There are 19 of them at this point that have been debuted today. They include things like:

- Who has the biggest brain?
- Chess
- Scrabble
- NPR
- The Huffington Post
- YouTube
- To-do List

"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," explains a joint post on the Google Blog from Marissa Mayer and Rose Yao. "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. If you don’t care to share, iGoogle’s social features are optional and can be disabled on a gadget-to-gadget basis with just a few clicks."

This appears to just be Google’s latest move in becoming more like one big social network. It all starts at the home page or your profile page right? This kind of reminds me of the social experience provided by Facebook apps.