27 April 2009

Google Launches Digg-style Social Voting Service ‘What’s Popular’

Search engine giant, Google, apparently digs Digg.

Or so it would seem, with the launch of a new iGoogle gadget which allows users to 'pop' stories found in Google News and across the World Wide Web to be voted on by other users of the app. Users of the widget can read and vote on 'All Popular' stories, which are ranked according to Google itself; 'My Pops' which are items that other users of the widget have voted on and 'My Adds' which are items submitted by the user.

While the similarities between the 'What's Popular' gadget and Digg are plain to see, Google's offering is not a stand-alone offering in the way of Digg, although it does suggest that a fully blown Google-style content sharing service could well be in the pipeline. It could also scotch any rumours of any potential acquisition of Digg by Google.
























The 'What's Popular' widget works on the same premise as Digg in that users can submit and vote for content they find interesting via copying and pasting a URL. There's no need for the user to assign titles and descriptions - these are handled by the gadget - although they can be changed if desired, just as they can in Digg. However, unlike Digg, URLs can be submitted anonymously and once added, users of the gadget can vote articles up or down. The gadget shows the number of upvotes the story receives - 'pops' and those articles with enough votes rise to the top of the pile.

Another feature of the 'What's Popular' widget which is similar to Digg is the function that allows content to be divided and organised between articles, videos and images, while users can also filter stories according to date, popularity and relevance.

Google has been tentatively testing the water of social media in recent times with the launch of such services as OpenSocial, Friend Connect and GTalk and last year speculation was rife that a Google acquisition of Digg was a 'done deal'. Now, with the addition of 'What's Popular', it appears the big 'G' may be ready to wade in for itself and it will be interesting to see if this gadget is a precursor to bigger things in the social media sphere for the Mountain View-based giant.

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