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Google just announced a small but useful update to the chat feature in iGoogle and Orkut, Google's social network. You can now use the chat feature to send photos, documents and other files directly to your contacts. More importantly, though, Google also announced that it plans to finally bring this file transfer functionality to Gmail's built-in chat feature. Right now, if you want to transfer a file to your Google contacts, you either have to email them the file or use the Google Talk desktop app or a compatible instant messaging client.

While tax season is always a scramble, one of the best perks of being self-employed is the fact that you can generally arrive to the office / living room in your pajamas. Think about all the blogs you read on a regular basis. Now imagine those people in their underwear, because that's honestly how the foremost technology bloggers are dressed as they deliver you the latest news. But video chat threatens to unsettle this wonderful world of pants-less utopia. This past weekend, Google announced the launch of iGoogle voice and video chat.

Google just rolled out 18 social gadgets for its iGoogle start page. These social gadgets turn iGoogle into a far more interactive and social experience, as users can now play casual games with other iGoogle users and share videos and to-do lists right from the iGoogle homepage. As Google's Marissa Mayer and Rose Yao, iGoogle's product manager, told us yesterday, while the first incarnation of iGoogle was about connecting people with information, the service will now also focus on connecting people to each other.

For reasons we can't possibly begin to fathom, Google killed off their iPhone-optimized mobile interface for iGoogle back in January, much to the chagrin of their users. Instead of just leaving the old version online while they made improvements, the company decided to redirect iPhone users to the standard mobile iGoogle page instead. The only explanation at the time was that they wanted all their users to have the same, consistent mobile experience.

But today it appears that Google has changed their mind and has decided to give smartphone users their own unique experience yet again. On the Google Mobile blog, they've announced a new-and-improved version of iGoogle, this time designed for both iPhone and Android users.

There are thousands of Google gadgets you can add to your iGoogle pages, from email checkers, games, even (wow, over 70) Twitter clients. The framework for these gadgets is flexible, allowing most of them to work not only in iGoogle but also on your PC using Google Desktop and in Gmail as a labs plugin. So when we write about a particular gadget, although it may not get as big as an iPhone app, there's still a lot of potential there.

The Google gadget called What's Popular came to our attention thanks to Steve Rubel's blog Micro Persusion. His take is that it has the potential to rival Digg. While we think that might be a bit ambitious, we definitely think the gadget is a lot of fun.

Fidelity, one of the world's largest financial service institutions, has just launched the first iGoogle secure banking gadget for use by their tens of millions of customers. With the new Fidelity Secure Gadget, customers no longer have to visit Fidelity.com or NetBenefits.com in order to check their account balances - they can now do so right from their own iGoogle homepage.