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Barry Hurd is a social media consultant helping business owners understand how to utilize emerging social media tools and understand the evolutionary trends that occur online.

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123 Guide to Google Gadgets

April 30th, 2008 • Related • Filed Under

A lot of people think they have to create new information for social media. While original content is good, it isn’t always necessary - in fact most popular sites barely have a drop of fresh content on them. There are dozens of different sites that provide functional, useful (and fun) gadgets, ranging from Widgetbox to Google. These gadgets have many different names: widgets, plugins, add-ons, toolbars…

If you haven’t been to the Google Gadgets area, stop by and pay it a visit. You will find everything from calender systems that allow you to share information on your site, flash enabled games (see below), on site chat, or even site to mobile phone messaging (for free.)

Some of the free features revolve around useful applications and tools. Some are entirely geeky and entertaining. For purposes of this piece, I selected my video game favorite PacMan and a free search tool that pulls results directly from Wikipedia (or several other dozen knowledge databases.)

In less than two minutes, I have enabled my readers with added functionality at absolutely no cost (PacMan simply looked too fun!)

With thousands of different sites that offer “plug and play”gadgets, there is little or no barrier to entry for even the smallest business owner, and larger businesses can leverage the open source economy to provide tools that would normally require hundreds of hours in development labor.

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