Over the past month, Facebook has not so smoothly transitioned third party content from boxes to tabs on your Facebook profile page. This is best explained by example: if you had a music box on your profile page, displaying what music you're listening to, then that box is now gone. Instead, you have the option of creating a tab for music. This works the same way as a web browser tab, opening a new page when clicked.
However, this means that fewer people will see your music updates - because it's hidden behind a tab. I for one think that's a shame. Nevertheless, tabs are where it's at now. So in this post we suggest 10 Facebook tabs that you might like to add to your Facebook profile.
In the sidebar of your Facebook profile, below information about you and your friends, you can place widgets (a.k.a. "boxes"). These typically pull in information from a third party web service - for example Twitter, a book reviews site, a music application. This is all possible thanks to a development platform which Facebook introduced in 2007, that allows companies to host their apps inside Facebook.
The trouble is, it's three years later and the user experience of Facebook widgets leaves a lot to be desired. Widgets are hard to find (or don't even exist), often broken, and if they do work they're clunky and restrictive.
As Internet users, we are becoming increasingly dependent on our social networks for a number of daily activities. We communicate with friends and family, share photos, invite and get invited to events and generally interact with the world around us. The social network is becoming the heart and soul of our Internet experience and Gigya will announce a range of new features this Thursday to help websites take full advantage of the roll of social media in today's online environment.
We spoke with David Yovanno, CEO of Gigya, this morning about the different ways people are using the Internet, how this has changed from the old model and how Gigya can help.View image
Widgets are mini web applications that you can insert into your website and/or social networks. They're a popular way to add interesting third party content to your web presence. In this post we look at the top web widgets from Yola and Widgetbox. It's clear from our analysis that widgets are well past the early adopter stage and are now very mainstream.
Yola, the website building service formerly known as SynthaSite, sent us a list of the top 10 widgets for its 3 million plus community - many of whom are small business owners. We compare that list below with the most popular widgets from more consumer-focused Widgetbox.
BookGlutton, a site launched in January 2008 to allow socially-enhanced online book reading, has just launched a nifty little widget. Now, blog and website owners can embed what amounts to a book club just about anywhere.
I tried it out on my own blog website (note to WordPress.com: please make it easier/possible for users to embed script widgets, kthx), and it's pretty tight. Once the user clicks the widget, they can read the book page by page, skip around chapters, chat about it with other cross-platform readers in a slide-out on the left, make comments (public or private) on specific passages in a slide-out on the right, and (for veteran BookGlutton users) even choose from a drop-down menu of groups for further reading.
Facebook launched its first social widget for use outside of Facebook's own site today: the Comments Box. The Comments Box is a comments widget that was built on top of Facebook Connect, and that will allow bloggers and publishers to easily implement a Facebook Connect enabled commenting system on their sites. A number of sites already used Facebook Connect to make it easier for their users to sign in to their services and leave comments, but this is the first time that Facebook itself ventures into this business.
We love Canadian startup PostRank here at ReadWriteWeb, but today the company has really outdone itself with the release of a powerful and eye catching new widget to display your blog's hottest posts.
PostRank scores every item in your (or any) RSS feed, by number of comments, inbound links, saves in Delicious, mentions on Twitter, votes on Digg, etc. It then offers a filtered view or feed of the most relatively popular posts in that feed. The new top posts widget offers powerful new functionality, can be customized and installed in less than a few minutes and looks really hot.
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.
In today's world of DVRs and online video distribution, "prime-time television" is rapidly becoming a meaningless term. Every minute of the day is prime-time for someone. And that makes services that provide easy access to that prime-time content incredibly popular. Like Hulu, for example.
But there's still the matter of getting people to the content or the content to those people. SplashCast - the service that creates full-fledged channels of embeddable entertainment content - may have the answer: "social TV players" that enable users to embed dynamically updated channels of Hulu content within their social network profiles.
Hearst Magazines Digital Media Web sites, including Seventeen.com and PopularMechanics.com, are rolling out Instant Messaging functionality for their readers to communicate with. Can group chat keep fickle web readers on this publisher's web pages? We suspect that it could work well, but the first implementation we've seen left a lot to be desired.
Powered by fast-growing web IM platform Meebo, these new chat widgets can be accompanied by multimedia that chat users can view together. In a world where the magazine industry has to be feeling some pain from sites like MySpace and Facebook, maybe magazines have to put a little MySpace on their own websites.
