Fans of iGoogle have probably noticed a new little widget on their screens when they log in. It’s called “What’s Popular” and it’s basically a Digg or StumbleUpon clone. It allows you to submit links/pages either publicly or anonymously and rate other people’s submissions up or down in kind.
Google says it “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.”
The widget is actually very cool and functional, though whether it will be able to get more popular than Digg is still up to question. When you click on the What’s Popular link to maximize it, an expanded view with sorted entries by type (page, picture, video, etc.) is shown.
Google is slowly, but surely moving into the social media game and this widget is their next step. I’m all for this so long as they don’t ruin their core service: search. Micro Persuasion thinks that Google will eventually be much like Windows Live in correlating friends’ content together.
On a side note, congratulations to Larry Page and his family. It’s been announced that his wife is pregnant and that they’re due for their first baby this fall.
