A few weeks ago I built a gadget for iGoogle, which is Google’s equivalent of a personalised home page and I have a few things to say about this experience in no special order:

1. Development is ugly.  Google suggest you use an iGoogle gadget to create your gadget – that’s right, you create a gadget using a gadget, and it’s not a particularly good gadget. The hardcore out there will use the gadget editor to create a blank XML file and then paste in code they created in their IDE, but I can just imagine the poor non-techie who beleived the hype about how easy it is.
2. iGoogle is Ugly.  It’s great that iGoogle has an API and a lot of example code, the only problem is you end up with thousands of the same crappy-looking RSS gadgets.  I really wanted to believe iGoogle is cool but after puking on my keyboard for 3 days I turned it off because I just couldn’t take aesthetic punishment anymore.
3. Deployment is messy. Great and all when you finally get your XML file ready and it seems to work well enought to submit into the Google catalog.  In my experience, once you submit an XML file and someone installs it, whatever changes you make don’t seem to take affect.  As a result I have 3 XML files with different names and 3 submissions to iGoogle.  If there is documentation about this it’s not easy to find.
4. Finding anything on iGoogle is LAME. Explain to me why the top search company in the world has such poor search functionality when you’re trying to find gadgets.  Why is it that when I enter Mail & Guardian as a search string, GMail comes up top?  Why is it that when I wrap the phrase in quotes I get the same lame results? Why is it that when I enter the EXACT name of the gadget into the search field I still see GMail? Not even the pager system on the bottom of the search works properly, sometimes it shows more pages than there are results, then tells you there are no results even though you were looking at them a minute ago.
5. Communication is non-existant. After submitting my gadget to the catalog and being told that Google screens the submissions, the least they could have done is emailed me when my gadget was listed.  Though, based on the search, it would’t surprise me if their own mail ends up in the Gmail spam folder.

All in all this is one of the poorest systems Google has deployed to day and should be perceived, internally, as an embarrasment to all involved.  Maybe someone forgot to show them the memo saying that now that Google is big, people expect the appropriate attention to detail.

I have one goof thing to say about iGoogle, which is that you can easily integrate it with Google Analytics to see how many people are using your gadget.  This is the rose among the weeds.

Get the Mail & Guardian Online iGoogle widget here.