Google Personalized Homepage, now surprisingly renamed the unoriginal iGoogle, is opening up gadget production beyond developers with ‘make your own gadget‘.
Now people without development or web design skills can use a wizard to create a series of personalised gadgets to embed into their iGoogle and share with others. Gadgets (or widgets depending on platform and prevailing wind) are being democratised across the web.
We’ve progressed from fixed content elements, to select your own ‘official’ gadget, to add/create a developer gadget, to now add/create your own ‘laymans’ gadget, it’s all part of reducing the barriers to entry of contributing and sharing content that we are seeing across the web.
Expect to see the wizards grow in number and sophistication across gadget (and other) platforms as web users grow more and more comfortable with personalising content consumption and the tools that enable them to do so become easier to use and build.
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