Most people are talking about the fact that Google handed out a new G2 Android mobile phone to all the attendees of their I/O get together today. As well there was something else that came out of it that doesn’t seem to be getting the blogger press I think it deserves.
During the keynote Google announced the immediate availability of a new set of widgets that you can add to your blog and have made it as easy as cut and pasting some code. The widgets are called Web Elements and while they may not seem that earth shattering on the surface I am beginning to think that they are just another building block in their much larger social media foundation.
There are currently six Web Elements, with more in the works apparently, and cover the gamut of Google services
- Calendar
- Conversation
- Custom Search
- Maps
- News
- Presentations
- Spreadsheets
- YouTube News
I installed the News one, which I customized, over on my home blog and thinking about adding the Conversation widget as well.
The interesting thing about the Conversation widget is that you can either restrict it to your blog or you can enable it to share with all your Friends through Google’s Friend Connect right across the whole web.
A nice bonus is that you can also translate a posted comment in the preferred language of a visitor. where it gets really interesting though is when you start getting into the other more specialized widgets like the Presentations Elements. this little slice of code will let you add a live updating widget of you Google Docs slide show presentations.
Like I said earlier – this is a very interesting move by Google and while you’ve been able to similar things with their APIs before this it has become drop dead simple to implement, which makes for a killer feature. I think this could end up having quite the impact and curious why others aren’t talking about it more.
What do you think of this addition from Google today?