I posted this as a reply to another post in one of the user forums, but thought it might be more appropriate here (slightly modified from the original).
It's not an exaggeration to say that more than half of the first 200 gadgets in the search for "the atlantic" are by "InsaneStunts" or "AppHaven," and they all follow more or less the same formula: an obscure youtube video no one would want to watch, plenty of google adsense ads, and occasionally a healthy string of & in the content to remind you that no human was involved in creating or reviewing the gadgets submitted to iGoogle. The only response I've seen from google about gadget spam (when there is any at all) is a link to the iGoogle policy / reporting page, but that seems to ignore the scope of the problem, as if it was just one author or one gadget breaking the rules (at the very least, all of the AppHaven and InsaneStunts gadgets appear to be in violation of the advertising guidelines). Even so, the issue isn't so much that these gadgets exist, but they have manage to game the rankings in the directory. Perhaps this is unrelated, but in other respects it seems like maintenance of the directory has fallen to the wayside. As far as I can tell, there has been nothing placed into a category in the directory since I started checking, back in June. I spent a fair bit of time on our iGoogle gadget, and though we've slowly gained an install-base, it is quite honestly hard to find us. The developers working at iGoogle add neat things on a regular basis (for instance, the new stats in the iGoogle dashboard) but without a modicum of content moderation to complement that work, I can't think of a compelling reason to develop for the iGoogle platform. If the next killer feature for iGoogle was spam submission detection, I might change my mind. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "iGoogle Developer Forum" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Gadgets-API?hl=en.
