Google's personalized home page, iGoogle, added a new feature that basically clones the core features of Digg and StumbleUpon by embedding them into a gadget that is easily accessible from right within the web desktop.
The feature, which Google started highlighting in its directory this week, is called "What's Popular." Using the widget consumers can submit links either anonymously or publicly and rate whether they like or dislike other submissions.
According to Google's description, the What's Popular gadget "uses algorithms to find interesting content from a combination of your submissions and trends in aggregated user activity across a variety of Google services, like YouTube and Google Reader."
That's just the half of it though. When you click on the maximize link the gadget expands into a canvas view that sorts submissions into different categories - e.g. stories, videos and images.
This won't be the last we see of Google adding social services to iGoogle. They are slowly adding such features to many of their products. Eventually I expect they will also follow Microsoft's lead in rolling up your friends' social content from around the web on Windows Live. (Microsoft is an Edelman client)
