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Technology Lifestyle The new iGoogle: life of the party or social outcast?
Technology Lifestyle The new iGoogle: life of the party or social outcast? | The new iGoogle: life of the party or social outcast? |
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| by David Swan | |
| Thursday, 13 August 2009 | |
  
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What can one do on this new iGoogle? Well thankfully there is no way to tell the world what you ate for breakfast... yet. What is possible, however, is the ability to share photos and YouTube videos, along with shared ToDo lists and the ability to play games with other users. After a couple of hours of toying, it seems much like a case of been there, done that, and iGoogle's take is a decidedly plain one at that. Google's a bit late to the party, and arrived without a fancy costume and without many gifts at all, really. There are just thirteen 'social' apps available at time of writing, and no "killer app" among them. In terms of practical use, the services offer some potential but other areas seem like a waste of time. Games between users is fun, but at the moment choices are limited to say the least. I had a game of chess with one of my mates, and, well, it was pretty tedious. It's not that I'm not good at chess, well I'm not, but my main gripe is that there were only two other public games I could join, when there should be hundreds, and the time limit between moves is seven days. Seven days between moves? Are we setting some kind of Guiness World Record? Looking at the services as a whole, which isn't difficult due to the number available, there are none to recommend that offer anything momentous. Other games are limited to merely sharing highscores with other players, which is of course nothing new. One promising aspect to OpenSocial is that it can, according to Google, " define a common API for social applications across multiple websites." This means that potentially users of iGoogle will be able to battle users of MySpace or Orkut for chess supremacy. This idea has some definite potential as the userbase for each app will be in the hundreds of millions, and will be an extremely large network. It is a bit disappointing, though, that the most positive aspect of a service is that I look forward to using other services. I can only speak in terms of personal experience, but iGoogle seems still shackled by a lack of public awareness, and subsequently an actual lack of people using the service. Other social networking websites continue to dominate, and whilst Google is still the place to conduct a web search, only advertising and active promotion will change public perception and help the internet using public to realise that iGoogle deserves their attention for things apart from searching. And it doesn't, yet. Until wider acceptance takes place, iGoogle seems like an barren destination; a desert with tumbleweed and no oasis in sight. Until iGoogle gains more apps and users, Facebook, Twitter, and even still Myspace fill the "timewaster" category more than aptly. Google's Gmail and Docs apps are standouts and are quite revolutionary in their respective categories, but the new iGoogle seems quaint, and a case of too little, too late. |
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