A mechanism to connect with your friends as you travel around the Web, a place to store and manage your network of relationships, and now… a platform for social apps.
Piece by piece, Google is building many of the core functions that define social networking. They do not all reside in one place, but as it finds more ways to link these things, the utility should increase exponentially.
Today brings news that the iGoogle personalised home page is about to become a platform for social apps (or gadgets, as Google calls them). You can already select from more than 60,000 apps, and these will increasingly come to include a social dimension: play a game of scrabble with your friends, for instance, or keep a joint running “to do” list with your spouse.
In another sign of the depth of its Facebook-envy, Google says that it will post notifications about your interactions with these social applications to an update list.
Of course, this rudimentary stream of iGoogle social activity will still lack the the killer app of real-time social feeds: status updates. And if Google really wants to get into that game, there is still, at least at the time of writing, an obvious takeover target out there…
