Google Turns Celebrities into Social Celebrities. Well, Maybe Half Social.

To tell you the truth, I have never even wondered about what a celebrity would do when he or she has some spare time online to surf the web for whatever purpose it may be. But I know that many people are interested in every step of their favorite actors or singers and numerous online resources use this factor in their marketing strategies (or simply to earn money off following such every step and publishing the results). Of course, having a celebrity blogging on a certain blogging platform will be sure to attract many fans of this celebrity to this particular platform so the reasons are obvious here.

Now it looks that even Google, as powerful a company as it is, also wants to get some extra traffic and visibility off engaging celebrities in one of their products. The choice is iGoogle, the personalized homepages service where you can collect all the content you want on one page and use it as your starting point to the surfing experience.

What Google has decided to do was attract 30 celebrities from Al Gore to Demi Moore and gather all their personalized homepages within one project – iGoogle Showcase. Such celebrities add their comments to all the widgets that they have and it is obvious that other users (not important enough to participate in iGoogle Showcase themselves) are able to grab the entire pages or themes or individual widgets from this or that celebrity and use them within their own iGoogle pages.

Some online celebrities are here as well: Arianna Huffington, Seth Godin (do check his widgets, they are worth it at least for his comments), Vint Cerf are all here as well as Kevin Rose sharing Digg staff as well as demonstrating that he has time for some Tetris as well as enjoys communications in Facebook and Friendfeed. Oh, and you will obviously find Ashton Kutcher here as well as he seems to be everywhere online these days.

Of course it is obvious that once the project gets noticed there will be numerous other people – some important enough, others simply willing to participate in such a cool crowd – willing to add their homepages to the selection available now and doing almost impossible to get on the default list here.

Unfortunately there is one huge problem here: when you know that the things you do will be witnesses by outsiders, chances are you will tweak what they will see so that they get a better impression of yourself than the reality is.

I remember creating a Netvibes public page for Profy when I was invited to join their program of publicly available homepages where every Netvibes user could grab widgets for use on their own pages. And believe me, that home page had almost nothing to do with what I actually read and do online but was focused on Profy instead gathering all the content related to this blog from around the web.

I think that it is obvious that in my daily reading I will hardly want to actually read Profy in my RSS reader – as checking how posts look in a freshly updated feed or how new bookmarking tools are integrated is usually perfectly enough for me. Besides, I don’t really think many of my readers would be interested in using my weather widget as it is set for Novosibirsk, Russia so unless you are planning a trip here you will hardly want to know how cold it is here.

So my guess here is that what we get from such celebrities will be an edited version of the reality as well – provided that they actually use iGoogle in their real lives at all.

In fact, to me it would be way more interesting to watch if such celebrities actually read all the feeds from all their news widgets: as someone who constantly has thousands of unread items in my RSS reader and feels bad about it all the time, I could feel better if I knew that Donald Trump is sometimes as disorganized a reader as I am.