...homepage by clicking on Getting Started. In the sandbox, you will be able to see a couple of new things:

• The navigation doesnt use top tabs anymore, but an expand-collapse style list to the left (there were JavaScript bugs when I tried clicking there, so I cant tell whats exactly supposed to happen).
• A new requestNavigateTo function in the iGoogle gadget language lets developers break out of the small gadget window and into a larger part within the iGoogle homepage. Google calls this larger window the canvas.
• You can now include the OpenSocial library into a gadget on the iGoogle homepage. This will provide you with some social network functionality, like lists of friends. A Sandbox Friends gadget is supposed to let you add friends.
• An updates gadget allows other gadgets to post a stream of news into it. (Entering updates.xml didnt show this for me, though, and the parts of the tutorial I saw didnt provide help on adding this either.)
• A profile editor gadget is supposed to let you edit user info. (The iGoogle Person object contains the fields ID, name, thumbnail and location.)
• Google pre-announced that iGoogle will some day support a requestSendMessage function as part of OpenSocial in order for you to send messages to other users.

Googles preview image of the updates gadget:

Just like the release of OpenSocial, the new iGoogle sandbox right now feels more like a flaky alpha experiment for brave-of-heart developers rather than something useful. There are broken links in tutorials, character encoding issues, JavaScript bugs and more. But in the long run, perhaps Google is aiming to clone functionality provided by social tools like Facebook or Friendfeed. While other social services start with the network " profiles, defining friendships and so on " and then put applications on top, Google seems to go the other route by stacking the social network on top of their existing apps. This in turn causes confusion in some areas, like when it comes to defining who your Google friends are in the first place.

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