Meet Google’s New Social Network: iGoogle

Outside of social networks, start pages like My Yahoo, AOL, and iGoogle are among the stickiest in terms of occupying user’s time. Thus, it makes sense that the latter is moving to make its service a lot more social in an effort to take up even more of user’s attention.

Today, iGoogle is launching a series of new features that transform the start page into a social network of sorts, complete with its own social graph, activity feed, and applications. It’s not the first attempt to make iGoogle more social by any means, but it’s certainly the most sweeping, and with millions of users in play, it represents an important new push by Google ().

Google’s VP Search Products & User Experience, Marissa Mayer, told me in an interview yesterday that essentially, these changes can be thought of as a “new set of gadgets and functionality that augments our existing iGoogle and allows them to be social.” Indeed, there are already thousands of gadgets available in the iGoogle ecosystem, though only a few of them are taking advantage of the new social capabilities as of today. Here are three examples of them:

YouTube (): This gadget now lets you filter by “Shared Activity” – i.e. – the videos your iGoogle friends have shared, as well as instantly share it yourself and leave comments. That activity is then visible to your friends in their YouTube gadget, as well as on their “Updates” page.

Scrabble: This is just like Scrabble for Facebook () (the EA version), but for iGoogle. There’s no time limit on moves, so games can be played over days or even weeks between iGoogle friends.

To-Do: Though quite simple, this could actually be a gadget that lures lots of users into iGoogle’s social features – shared to-do lists.

An important thing to note about these features is that the social graph – i.e. who sees your comments and shares – is separate from other Google products like Gmail () or Google Reader (). Hence, what we’re basically talking about is a separate social network for iGoogle, where the “Updates” link is akin to Facebook’s News Feed, showing activities from your friends on iGoogle. Meanwhile, for developers looking to target iGoogle’s users with social gadgets, all of these features are now a part of the iGoogle Gadget API.

It would certainly seem that iGoogle now has all of the makings of a social network: millions of users, activity feeds, and an ecosystem for apps. The challenge – and it’s no small one – is getting those users to start doing things like sharing their to-do lists and favorite YouTube videos using iGoogle, which will ultimately build out the user networks that something like this needs in order to succeed.