Google has just rolled out a new feature for its startpage iGoogle – the canvas views from some of its most popular gadgets and full reading views for feeds. For those not in the loop, Google Reader and iGoogle are almost the same product. Google Reader is a feed aggregator which also supports some Google gadgets, iGoogle is a startpage which also supports RSS feed reading.
Google Reader has implemented full feed reading views for quite sometime now. Makes me wonder how come iGoogle is introducing the said feature only now, well at least for RSS feeds. Anyway, the iGoogle canvas views lets you spread out the content of a particular iGoogle gadget for a wider screen and a better reading experience and most important without you needing to leave the iGoogle page anymore.
But since iGoogle uses gadgets for displaying site information, not all iGoogle gadgets will have the canvass view yet. For starters the following popular iGoogle Gadgets now have the canvass views and you can only access that if you have shift to the new iGoogle page already at http://www.google.com/ig.
- The New York Times
- The Wall Street Journal
- The Washington Post
- GoComics gadget
- YouTube
- CurrentTV.
- TV Guide
- Flixster’s movies gadget
- iLike gadget
- Gmail gadget
- Google Finance
Clicking on those gadget links will bring you to the iGoogle subscription page where you can add the gadgets to your iGoogle page if you haven’t added them yet.
Frankly, maybe Google should think about integrating iGoogle and Google Reader. Both serves almost the same purpose and practically overlaps in their respective functions. Or maybe, I’m missing out something which differentiates this two web services from each other. Care to enlighten me?
