Sep Kamvar's Google Gadgets Presentation

I'm at e.day in Rotterdam, and just got finished watching Sep Kamvar present on Google Gadgets / iGoogle.  Here are a couple of bullets that I found interesting:

• There are 10K gadgets in the Google Gadgets directory
• Sep talked about it as a virtuous cirlce - more gadgets attract more users, and more users attract more gadgets.
• He profiled three independent gadget develoers with respectively, 250K, 2.8M, and 6.5M pageviews per week
• He talked about the evolution as being: 1) hobbyists developing gadgets for their friends; 2) businesses developing gadgets for commercial reasons; 3) an economy rising around the development and consumption of gadgets complete with acquisitions and companies whose sole focus is Google Gadgets (Lab Pixies)
• The "magic tabs" feature which allows users to name a tab on iGoogle after one of their interests (e.g. "surfing"), and Google Gadgets populate the tab based on that tab.  (how are those gadgets ranked / prioritized I wonder?)
• Adding "recommendations" to a magic tab results in Google populating the tab with Gadgets based on your personalized searching history.  Cool but a little invasive?

It sounds like Google is working on more ways to put Gadgets in front of people... with all the Facebook buzz, it's easy to forget about Google Gadgets.  Maybe we shouldn't.

Comments

[pat]

Hi, I appreciate you putting this out. My blog is about Google gadgets and I was hoping to maybe ask you a couple of question on what was said.

[lawrence]

Hey Pat, sure thing. You can email me at lawrence at rateitall.com.