Google's New "What's Popular" Feature Aims to Clone Digg

Google's personalized home page, iGoogle, added a new feature that basically clones the core features of Digg and StumbleUpon by embedding them into a gadget that is easily accessible from right within the web desktop.

The feature, which Google started highlighting in its directory this week, is called "What's Popular." Using the widget consumers can submit links either anonymously or publicly and rate whether they like or dislike other submissions.

According to Google's description, the What's Popular gadget "uses algorithms to find interesting content from a combination of your submissions and trends in aggregated user activity across a variety of Google services, like YouTube and Google Reader." 

That's just the half of it though. When you click on the maximize link the gadget expands into a canvas view that sorts submissions into different categories - e.g. stories, videos and images.

This won't be the last we see of Google adding social services to iGoogle. They are slowly adding such features to many of their products. Eventually I expect they will also follow Microsoft's lead in rolling up your friends' social content from around the web on Windows Live. (Microsoft is an Edelman client)

Comments

[Prince Sioni]

nice improvement to google reader.

http://princesioni.com

[Anka]

I usually prefer when google is improving their products, instead of acquiring, because that usually doesn't end well for acquired service.Greetings,

[Steve Rubel]

There are a few exceptions (Grandcentral, Blogger) but overall you areright.

[布里斯班]

I think it's quite interesting.

[Jason Lancaster]

Cool - now all they need to do is iFrame the content when you click the link - think of all the money Google could make! (Cough - Digg - cough).

[Ike]

Cuanta imaginación.

[Paul]

This is interesting. The capability of google to track trends seems like it could be quite useful.

[atul chatterjee]

Google is gaining more information about personal preferences and searches.

[athar]

found to be very interesting..

http://www.paksmile.com

[lk123456]

en, interesting,nice improvement to google readerhttp://www.vcao.net