iGoogle Users

Every day, people worldwide choose iGoogle as their homepage, customizing it with information and tools they find useful. To help you build a better gadget, here is some information about our users:

• There are tens of millions of active users on iGoogle worldwide
• iGoogle was one of the fastest growing Google products in 2006 and 2007, and continues to grow
• Approximately 50% of iGoogle users are in the U.S., with large user bases in the U.K., France, Japan, Germany, Canada, Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands as well
• iGoogle is available in 42 languages and 73 domains

About iGoogle users

iGoogle provides users with their own private page to personalize with content that they find most interesting and useful. Each iGoogle page is as unique as the person who creates it. Some use iGoogle to keep a pulse of the day, frequently checking news headlines, stocks and weather. Others track their favorite blogs, play games, or keep a list of their to-do's. You can develop a gadget to satisfy any of these needs and preferences.

The integration of OpenSocial with gadgets gives you an opportunity to enhance your content for users by incorporating social features. For example, a books gadget could display what a user's friends are reading, allow users to request to borrow books from friends' libraries, and show users books that their friends recently rated. As users share content with their friends, your gadget will naturally build a broad audience for distributing content and driving traffic.

Of course, you can create a great gadget that doesn't have social features as well. Lots of popular gadgets, like email and weather, are critical parts of a user's homepage and do not require social components. You can still take advantage of the canvas view feature to build a richer gadget with more content and functionality.

What users want

1. Concise gadgets. Users have limited space in home view so try and be conservative with the gadget's height. Add more content and functionality in canvas view.
2. Fresh content. Keep users engaged with up to date content every time they see their homepage.
3. Personalized content. Gadgets that contain content focused around the user will perform better. Remember that the iGoogle pages are private for the user's eyes only.
4. Social features. If appropriate, add social features to your gadget to take advantage of viral sharing among friends.
5. Speed and more speed. Users want fast gadgets.

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