Imagine waking up and your site is inaccessible for no apparent reason. If this happens, site owners could spend a ridiculous amount of time trying to figure out what the problem is. Well welcome to that reality. Thousands of site owners have experienced this today after Sitemeter brings their sites to a halt.
Even though last night's big contests in Kentucky and Oregon ended in a split decision, with big wins for both Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, most pundits now agree on who is most likely to be the Democratic nominee for president when the convention rolls around in August. Hint: it's the candidate who has dominated nearly every method we could think of to measure election momentum on the web. We got some data last night from widget-provider Widgetbox that shows the same trend for viral widget installs.
Steve O'Hear (who edits our digital lifestyle blog last100) has an interesting post on his ZDNet blog that questions whether Google's OpenSocial initiative is at all about data portability, or if in fact it really just about widget standardization. O'Hear quotes heavily from a recent article by Marc Canter, who is a strong advocate for open standards and data portability, that ran on CNet.
Yahoo! tonight announced the release of the latest version of the Yahoo! Widgets platform, version 4.5. For developers, the platform includes a range of new features, including the ability to use video, widgets for spreading your widgets, and better security disclosures. But the single most important new feature in this release is a re-architected widget core that gives developers full access to the DOM, as well as HTML and Flash.
What that means is that any developers with web collateral in HTML or Flash can easily transform their web widgets into desktop widgets. Yahoo! is already working with the leading web widget distribution platforms, including Netvibes, Clearspring, and MuseStorm, to bring their widgets offline. Netvibes has already committed to bringing the thousands of widgets created for their ecosystem to the desktop via Yahoo! Widgets.
MuseStorm will bring some of its high profile widgets to the desktop by the end of the year, and Clearspring will enable some of their widgets on the Yahoo! platform as well. All three will be able to offer desktop distribution as an option to developers via Yahoo!'s new system.
Ticketmaster, the formerly IAC-owned events behemoth, went from large to small today, launching an affiliate widget program.
Blogger Rex Dixon caught the release. The company says it's the first primary ticket seller to offer an affiliate program, though there's a thriving economy of secondary affiliate ticket sales online. How many of those affiliate programs have their own snazzy widgets, though?
Affiliate links can be served up in text or through any of seven Flash widgets. The sample widgets appear in a standard size but with awfully small text. I suppose people whose eyes aren't sharp enough to read it are too old for rock and roll anyway.
Affiliates will receive fifty cents for each ticket they sell priced between $20 and $60, $1.50 for tickets priced between $150 and $199, and up to $5.00 for tickets priced above $500. That's a 1% commission on $500 tickets, hardly a generous sum.
Programs like this seem to illustrate the way that a long-tail economy can take the form of countless points of distribution feeding into the same major players that already dominated the old economy. Monopoly is a net-negative in terms of social impact, something that any of countless Ticketmaster-haters can tell you. Now the company will deploy an army of widgets to do its bidding. Can you think of a scarier widget play?
In a cheeky move, Netvibes has released a Facebook widget. Both Netvibes and Facebook are leading Web platforms for widgets (i.e. mini web apps that can be plugged into web pages and sites). So Netvibes is neatly trying to entice Facebook users to use Netvibes instead of Facebook as their homepage. Here is an example of the Facebook widget that Netvibes has released:
Of course it only includes Facebook data, not data from third party widgets. To be really cheeky, Netvibes should find a way to include all your third party Facebook widgets ;-) However Netvibes has actually done very well, because the only thing missing seems to be Facebook's news feed - because Facebook does not currently allow outsider providers to access the News Feed. Given that Facebook is not very open (at least outwards), this is impressive. Also it should be mentioned that you still need to click through to facebook to go through your friend requests, group invites, etc.
When you think of widgets you typically think of web 2.0 companies. Flickr, Digg, del.icio.us were among the first services with widgets and many more followed. Indeed, if you're a startup then it could be seen as unusual nowadays if you don't have a widget strategy.
But the older and larger companies are still trying to wrap their hands around widgets. Just recently, we profiled NBC signing up to use Clearspring. This move clearly signals that NBC is serious about their widgets strategy.
In this post we look at an unlikely widget company, Random House Publishing. A quick look at their web service and the widget is enough to realize that the company "gets it". But a deeper look reveals that Random House not only has gotten the widget bug, it also has a broad and solid strategy around widgets. The publishing giant is using widgets to build its presence and brand awareness everywhere online.
The web has seen an explosion in the use of widgets over the past year or so. So let's explore what a widget is and its uses. Note that in this post, we're discussing Web-based widgets only, rather than desktop widgets such as those provided by Yahoo Widgets or Microsoft's Vista widgets.
A Web widget can be best described as a mini application that can add functionality to your web page, blog, social profile etc. If you find a widget that you like, you simply copy and paste some code and add it to the HTML of your web page. Photo galleries, news, videos, advertising, mp3 players and pregnancy countdown tickers! You name it, there is probably a widget that does it.
There have been a lot of very successful widgets to date. Here is a sample:
MyBlogLog is a widget that allows you to see other bloggers on the MyBlogLog network, as they visit your site. You can see it in action on the right hand side of this post. It has been a huge success for its creators and was acquired by Yahoo for a rumored $12 million in January.
RateItAll, a social network based around online reviews and opinions, has released a new distributed rating widget. It enables users to not only view (read) a widget, but to interact with it and enter data (write). The initial application for RateItAll's read/write widget is a blog feedback badge, which is the first of many distributed rating applications coming from RateItAll.
I spoke to RateItAll founder Lawrence Coburn about the release. He described the new widgets as "sort of like a cross between Power Reviews and MyBlogLog." He told me that the initial use case is blogs, but "soon we hope to hook it into our local business directory (like a distributed Yelp)." He told me there are lots of potential applications - e.g. for politicians, bands, movies, and things like MySpace profiles. With the widgets, RateItAll is aiming to be the de facto ratings infrastructure provider "for a significant chunk of the Web".
Here is an example, a ratings widget for this blog. You'll note Lawrence's rave review of Read/WriteWeb, which I should point out he actually wrote well before my review :-) As an aside, I actually met Lawrence in person at last year's Web 2.0 Summit, hence the reference in his review to drinking beer with me at the famous House of Shields bar!
Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus
2006 was a year of many
interesting Web happenings and 2007 is looking like another bumper
year. In all the excitement, we wondered what can we give R/WW readers for Christmas?
Well since most of you are busy spending time with your families, unwrapping real
presents and likely having a lot of turkey, we need to think of something... well, bite
sized. So we thought - widgets! After all, widgets were one of the big things in 2006 and
they are likely to (pardon the pun) get much bigger in 2007. But instead of an analysis
of the widget marketplace (there's xmas pudding to get to, after all), we want to present
something simple. So we give you now the top five widgets for your blog, as recommended
by the widget experts over at Widgetbox - but with
our own commentary and guide on top.
Top 5 widgets every blogger must have
Tracy Pizzo, the Director of Business Development at Widget box, emailed us a handpicked list of the top 5 must-have widgets for every blogger. This list was compiled based on popularity on Widget box, as well as ease of use and user appeal. The top 5 are:
