I made a quick gadget that highlights the canvas view on iGoogle using Hulu and Stephen Colbert.

There are many social functions to Open Social, however let’s just look at the spacial differences by looking at the home view and the canvas view of iGoogle…

Colbert Big, Colbert Small

Here is a gadget on iGoogle page (with my spiffy Colbert theme)

Let’s look closer at the gadget….

The link that says “Make Colbert bigger” is just a link to to “canvas view” within iGoogle. When a user clicks that link they will remain on iGoogle but will see the gadget canvas page. In this case the gadget canvas views shows the Colbert video much larger…

Example code:

To see this gadget in action and play with the code will require that you can see the new iGoogle layout. To add this example gadget go here

To learn how to get the new iGoogle go here

The different possible features of an iGoogle Open Social gadget are shown by Google here

To see the Google help documentation explaining the navigational features of the home and canvas views go here

To see the actual code for the above Colbert gadget go here