iGoogle wants you to be Social

Google announced yesterday that they now have a group of widgets for your iGoogle page that will allow you to interact better with your peers. Currently they feature 19 different widgets that include chess, scrabble, flixster, trivia, photo sharing and more.

iGoogle was implemented in 2005 to allow users to customize their own person page to include various widgets. These widgets feature a wide range of functionality from getting weather reports to finding information about movies playing in your local area. A similar concept was first introduced by Yahoo! referred to as My Yahoo!.

So How do these gadgets let you interact with your peers?

Google reports that you can share information on the different widgets if your friends have the same widget on their page or through a new feed service they have dubbed Updates. Google recently posted the following information about how to use the Update technology.

Updates can include your recently shared photo albums, your favorite comics strips, your travel plans for the weekend and more. To help you manage who you are sharing with, we’ve created a Friends group. You can add and edit friends in this group at any time. If you already have a Friends group within your Google Contacts, you’ll be able to easily share with those friends on iGoogle as well. If you don’t care to share, iGoogle’s social features are optional and can be disabled on a gadget-to-gadget basis with just a few clicks.

While Google’s attempts to go social in the past have not been meet with much success, maybe these social widgets will allow the search giant to gain some traction before releasing the new Google Wave service.