Google has rolled out it’s attempt to compete directly with Facebook by adding a social feature to its iGoogle homepage. It is a halfhearted attempt if you ask me and should have been developed further before being released as it is less than ideal in its current state. iGoogle has the potential to squish Facebook, but not in it’s current state.

For those of you who haven’t heard of iGoogle – I hear most of my friends saying “iGoogle, what’s that?” – it is, as Google puts it:

… a way for people to quickly and easily personalize their Google experience with all the information on the web that was most useful to them.

iGoogle was launched in 2005 – a long way back – and although Google claims 10’s of millions of people use it, I am not so sure.

I have started using it more in the past year as I always find myself logged into Google, either using Google AdWords, Google Analytics or Google Reader. Therefore it has become useful for me in that I have added a to-do-list, the weather forecast, a procrastinator clock which keeps me on time by always being fast, a currency converter, world clocks for the countries where my family is located, some mountain bike videos and the World’s worst weather forecast.

In some ways it is more useful than facebook, however the recent addition of ‘Social Gadgets for iGoogle’, and the added ‘Chat’ feature seem less than spectacular.

To add friends to the chat feature, one must manually input email addresses separated by commas. This is less than ideal and I doubt that anyone will bother with it. I am tempted so that I can write something useful for this blog post, however I still cannot be bothered. I’ll use the chat feature when I can add friends with a feature by which iGoogle can access my hotmail, yahoo, gmail or even facebook account to see which friends are already using iGoogle and invite those automatically who aren’t.

Keep in mind though that iGoogle’s social network is only currently working if you are located in Australia, and slowly being launched in the US over the following week.

Let’s be honest though – there are only so many social networking gadgets that we can use, and keep up to date with. Facebook has proven to be extremely popular so I cannot see that all (or most, or even some) Facebook users are going to adopt iGoogle’s new social network. Perhaps a better idea would have been to integrate Facebook with iGoogle, if that is at all possible. I am sure it will be in the future. For now, I am bamboozled with choice and therefore I will use what I find the most convenient:

• Facebook for photo sharing and tagging, and a few games, plus some chatting and status updates, comments etc.
• Messenger for chat with friends or colleagues in more of a business sense.
• iGoogle for my to-do-list
• Google Accounts for access to Google AdWords, Google Analytics, Google Reader, Google Maps, Webmaster Tools, iGoogle
• and well that’s about it.

I am happy with this list and have so many friends already on Facebook that I am not in any hurry to change my social network to iGoogle. In fact, should iGoogle become any more congested I may drop using it as well.

For more information on iGoogle Social Gadgets watch the clip below or visit the blog post from Google on “I scream, you scream, we all scream for iGoogle social!”