Search Engine Optimization News Blog

We all know that social networking is the wave of the future. FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter, and a host of other social and networking sites have pushed to the forefront the nations insane need to know what everyone else is doing, thinking, saying.

We love to vote, to critique, to make fun of. We want to share our opinions, (and even hear what other people have to say!), spread the good word (or gossip), and we absolutely love pictures, videos and music. Mash-up, anyone?

With all this attention, it’s not surprising that Google has decided they need to step up the pace and get a little more into the game. The familiar iGoogle is expanding. The top-of-the-page tabbed navigation feature is shifting to a sidebar, and the gadgets will be getting an expanded interface, called ‘Canvas View’.

Canvas View is designed to show a broader range of information for your gadgets, from your friends and all their doings to your own faves and projects. The richer content value and functionality are expected to encourage more people to use the interface, and Google hopes it will come to rival some of its competitors.

Feed will also be available to track such things as Google Reader, Picasa WebAlbums, Google-Talk message statuses and shared themes and gadgets. The Canvas View should allow a seamless Google Reader-like interface, and later this summer the social site aspect should be completed as iGoogle becomes able to support the application.

Google passed on MySpace several years ago, and Microsoft snapped up FaceBook. Yahoo has its own version of A social site in Yahoo buzz, and Google seems to think it needs to ratchet up the competition.

Could this have anything to do with the growing trend towards social networking as a marketing tool? Certainly Google wants to keep their fingers in all the pies it can! A serious iGoogle social network could be a viable tool to keep advertising dollars ‘in house’, so to speak.

In the meantime, Google still has YouTube, which should work well with the proposed new Networking plan. Videos and pics are shared much more often as plain textual information, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see an added feature in the future allowing an easier interface to YouTube as well.

The Google APIs are not supporting quite all of the new gidgets and gadgets yet, but hang in there; we should be fully supported by the end of the year. OpenSocial promises to be quite a ride, so be prepared to spend some time exploring!