Starting this week, we're rolling out some new social gadgets for iGoogle to all Australian users. Not only can you continue to do all the things you love to do on your homepage, but you now have the option to share all kinds of information, play games and collaborate with your friends too. We've released 12 new social gadgets to choose from, so that there's something for everyone. If you're into reading news or watching videos and want to share interesting findings with your friends, you can now easily do so with gadgets like GoComics, YouTube, or News.com.au. If you enjoy playing games, add favourites like Chess, Who Has the Biggest Brain, or the New York Times Crossword gadget. And if you're a productivity guru, try out our new social To-Do gadget -- we can only provide the gadget, the actual productivity is up to you!
Your current gadgets will continue to work normally and you don't have to take advantage of the social gadgets if you decide it doesn't fit your interest. But by adding and enabling social gadgets, you'll be able to have an even deeper, interactive experience with your gadgets when you share them with friends. In fact, we've created a Friends group so that you can share things with the people you care about. If you have a Friends group within your Google Contacts, you will be able to share with those friends on iGoogle without any extra work. You can add and edit friends in and out of this group at any time.
Your friends are able to see what you share or do in social gadgets through the gadgets themselves, or through a new feed of information called Updates, a way to see what your friends are doing on iGoogle without adding all the gadgets that they have. Updates can include everything from favourite YouTube videos, to recently shared photo albums, to movie plans for the upcoming weekend...the list goes on and on!
We'll be rolling out these features starting this week. So if you don't see your iGoogle page updated yet, just check back. These social gadgets will continue to have more features built into them and are the first of many to come. We're also encouraging all gadget developers to take advantage of iGoogle's growing audience of tens of millions of users and start building a social gadget for iGoogle If you're an interested developer, you can read more about it on our developer site: code.google.com/igoogle. If you have questions or feedback, check out our support site.
We hope these new social features will enhance the way you discover content and share with friends. But that's enough from me for now -- my iGoogle page is telling me that it's time to make my next Chess move!
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