Inside Social Games

Personalization and social features have become core features for web portals for quite some time now. Social networks continue to expand beyond the realms of just one website and into games, phones, apps, and portals. Personalized home pages like My Yahoo, iGoogle, My MSN, and My AOL have been adding social elements to their dashboards.

With 44 million monthly visitors, My Yahoo is currently the most popular, but with over 25 million monthly visitors iGoogle is catching up.  And now, Google has rolled out new social widgets – including a variety of popular social games – for users.

Some of the new iGoogle social games should be rather familiar: Electronic Arts’ Scrabble, and highly popular Playfish app, Who Has The Biggest Brain? They play almost exactly the same way as they do on Facebook.

iGoogle users are able to share the widgets with contacts. Recipients get an invite to the gadget and upon acceptance will have it added to their home page. Furthermore, they will be able to see any and all contributions (like comments) that the others, with whom the gadget is shared, make, via the “Updates” section.

According to Google VP, Marissa Mayer and iGoogle Product Manager, Rose Yao, the idea behind the addition is to increase engagement. While social games in a portal will probably never be as engaging as they are on Facebook, they should help a lot. It will be interesting to see how successful these games are, and who else jumps on board.