What’s Popular Google Gadget – A Closer Look

With mentions in Mashable and SearchEngineLand this Digg like gadget is off to a very good start. The What’s Popular gadget shows stories, videos and images that are popular. You can submit your own stuff to the gadget and these things can be voted on.

What’s Popular? How about What’s Probable?

There are some notable things about how this gadget is made. First off, this gadget is a URL gadget, meaning it is using type=”url”. This is very interesting to me since Google has not really used this type of gadget for any of it’s official gadgets. This type of Google gadget simply displays content from a url, which means the content behind this gadget is at a live web page…

http://www.google.com/labs/popgadget/world

This means that the about url is searchable, indexable, etc. Here it is in the Google results:

This is a full swing, functioning website and will likely serve as the home page of this service at a later date. In other words, expect this service to be a web based feature of Google. This is not a gadget only project by any means.

This service will become popular itself among iGoogle users. In fact, if history serves as a guide, I can almost assure you that this gadget will become a default gadget on new iGoogle pages.

Virtually all competitors to Digg lack one common thing, distribution.

Guess what? By making this a default Google gadget on iGoogle this gadget (and therefore this service) will have around 8 million users almost overnight. iGoogle is a distribution monster.

I am willing to bet three things about Google What’s Popular

• It will be a web based service soon
• It will be a default Google gadget on iGoogle
• It will definiately be a contender to other voting sites, even Digg.

This is how Google distributed the Gmail gadget and the YouTube gadget, I see no reason why the same won’t be true of the “What’s Popular” service as well.