Why iGoogle’s ‘Social Gadgets’ Should Kill Facebook — Datamation.com.

Mike Elgan writes:

iGoogle as a social networking site sits directly between MySpace and Facebook in the area of customizability. It’s more customizable than stodgy, boring Facebook, but less customizable than garish, horrid MySpace.

Strong words, yes.  I somewhat agree with them. I haven’t seen iGoogle yet as social media, more personal homepage. But a clear transformation has been happening; I for one am excited about it.

We have application classes to work with–and understanding them is going to be of assistance in our attempt to accomplish things at any given time.  I’ve noticed more noise in regard to this.  It’s a great question to ask.  Social Networking, Social Media, Personal Home Page, News Reader, Portal, and so on.   At this point, out of all sites and all application types, my home is Google Reader.  I’ve got my sources and I’ve categorized them into groups.  No fuss, no gimmicks.  Just stories and opinions.  This is where morning coffee happens.  Information as far as I see it.  And I chose it over iGoogle–but I’m at iGoogle before long.  I’ve got a Google Reader widget in iGoogle (as well as a twitter gadget and a weather gadget and 20 other of those 60,000), but the widget in too clunky in iGoogle to really get a grip on it.   So I’ll get over to it in a tabbed window and switch around a bit.

We’ll see how iGoogle transforms. It seems with widgets these days, an introvert’s index.html could turn into a social networking site.  Cut and paste some code.  Get some FaceBook connect implementation happening and then promote it.

I’ll be checking out those new igoogle gadgets for sure. I have been an iGoogle user for quite a while now and have preferred iGoogle over FaceBook and MySpace. With the $ at stake, changes are going to be taking place in nanoseconds.  Oh yeah, and good luck killing FaceBook.

This Flickr Related Tag Browser by Felix Turner is a masterpiece. You can simply spend time using this multimedia search tool to check out all the photos and the brilliant manner in which results are presented; but as far as I can see, it’s as close as you can get to a living, breathing thesaurus, complete with related photo albums generated on the fly. Enter a word and see related terms and photos come right back at you, in an animated and compelling presentation.