Google has launched a new developer sandbox for iGoogle gadgets that looks suspiciously like a proto-social networking site. The new sandbox allows developers to build and test applications that use the OpenSocial tools Google announced last year.
With iGoogle users numbering in the tens of millions, the new OpenSocial tools in iGoogle could pave the way for Google’s long anticipated answer to Facebook or MySpace. Of course Google still has Orkut, which is ostensibly its answer to social networking, but outside of India and Brazil Orkut has never really caught on.
By turning iGoogle into a social network hub, Google can potentially convert the service’s built-in user base and perhaps grab some traffic from Facebook. The new developer site for iGoogle gadgets says, “the integration of OpenSocial with gadgets gives you an opportunity to enhance your content for users by incorporating social features.”
It probably won’t be hard, using for instance OpenSocial and the Facebook API, for developers to create widgets that track your friends on all sorts of social network sites — Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, etc. In that scenario iGoogle becomes a centralized hub where you can track your friends without having to login to each of those sites separately.
As Ionut Alex Chitu over at Google Operating System speculates, the new sandbox “is probably a test for the next iteration of iGoogle: the personalized homepage turned into a social network.”
Also interesting is the possibility of grabbing all your social networking info using a site like FriendFeed and then plugging FriendFeed into your iGoogle page. In that scenario FriendFeed does the heavy lifting, but iGoogle ends up with the traffic.
Of course it remains to be seen whether iGoogle fans want that sort of functionality or whether they just like the widget-based homepage without the clutter of social networking fads.
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