WebProNews

In a recent post that was about 125 words long, a Googler included the term "social" four times.  Keep Facebook, MySpace, and whatever else you like in mind, then, while learning about a new developer sandbox for iGoogle.

"The sandbox includes support for OpenSocial, a common API designed to let you easily build social applications that run on a growing number of web containers," noted Saurabh Mathur on the Google Code Blog.  "The iGoogle OpenSocial container also supports canvas view, allowing developers to build powerful and feature-rich full-page applications for iGoogle's tens of millions of users."

 iGoogle Developer Sandbox

Mathur continued, "To get started, please begin with the documentation and examples on the iGoogle developer website.  The site includes detailed information about iGoogle and a guide to incorporating the new social features."

This isn't the same as demanding help building the next hot social network, but it's easy to at least allow for that interpretation.  Orkut's failed to find a foothold in America, and iGoogle and OpenSocial already have one.  A lot of personal info is in place; now Google's getting some developers to work for free.

Whatever Google's got in mind, however, it'll probably be a while before it's ready for public consumption.  Philipp Lenssen writes, "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."