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.

Firstly, if like me you were wondering how to find and add new tabs, Facebook recently added a search feature to the 'Add a new tab' option. As per the screenshot below, enter the name of an application in the search box. If there is a tab available for that app, then it will pre-populate. You can also add any of the 10 tabs below by entering the name (auto-suggest will help you).

One hopes that eventually there will be a directory of Facebook tabs, to make the process of finding new tabs easier. There is a directory of apps, but not all apps have tabs.

10 Facebook Tabs to Check Out

This list is in no particular order and we welcome your own suggestions in the comments.

1. Last.fm

Nice simple two column layout. Features a list of your recently listened tracks, alongside top tracks of the last 7 days (as measured by Last.fm, at least). Facebook also offers its own tab called "Music", powered by iLike.

2. Goodreads

Did we mention that when Facebook removed boxes, they also reduced the the width of tabs from 760 to 520 pixels wide? Many apps have clearly not updated their design to accommodate this - Goodreads being one of them. This is the disappointing thing about tabs as they currently stand. Many third party providers have decided not to put any effort into optimizing their content for Facebook's new tabs.

3. Causes

Lists out the causes (charities, advocacies and more) that you support.

4. Flickr

The FlickrTab by Tabfusion is nicely implemented and perhaps shows the way for other third party apps. Worth getting this app if you're a regular user of the photo sharing service Flickr.

5. Questions

Facebook Questions, the Q&A service that Facebook launched at the end of July, has its own tab. You'll want to add it if you use Questions often (as our own Marshall Kirkpatrick does).

6. Slideshare

Slideshare is a service where you can upload and share slideshows. The tab is a good way to showcase this content.

7. Art Gallery

Like Goodreads, this tab has not adjusted to the reduced tab width dimensions. However if you're a fan of art, this is the best app that we know of on Facebook (let us know in the comments if you know of a better one, because Art Gallery really isn't that good to be honest).

8. YouTube

If you're a frequent YouTube user, as uber-blogger Robert Scoble is, you'll find the YouTube tab to be relatively well designed.

9. NetworkedBlogs

This app has been around for a while, as a way for Facebook users to add content from their blogs into their profiles. The tab isn't aesthetically pleasing, as is the case with much of Facebook's content, but it's a start.

10. myPersonality

If you've taken the Myers Briggs personality test on Facebook, then this tab displays the results for all to see.

Tell Us Your Favorite Facebook Tabs

Those are our 10 picks for Facebook tabs. Let's be frank though, it's slim pickings at this point in time. Facebook launched a development platform to great fanfare in 2007, but not many third party apps have created a compelling experience inside Facebook. Partly that's due to tabs being an inadequate way for third parties to showcase their services. And as noted above, few people will click on tabs on their friends profiles. Indeed, many people don't even visit their friends profiles after the initial friending.

But we have to make do with what we have. So what are your favorite Facebook tabs?

Update: Facebook plans to scrap tabs from profiles too, as well as boxes. "...due to low usage rates, we will remove application tabs from user profiles in the next couple months. Application tabs will continue to be supported on Facebook Pages."

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.

The Issues With Facebook Widgets

The first difficulty is that widgets are typically hard to find and set up. If you go to the Facebook Apps directory, it's hard to tell which apps have "boxes" - many apps simply publish information to your wall.

To test this, I looked for a widget for a common web service. Last.fm, You Tube, Flickr: all came up with nothing on the widget front. Eventually I found one for Delicious, the social bookmarks service owned by Yahoo. But only after the official Delicious Facebook app page pointed me to an "unofficial" widget called My Delicious. I filled in the required information, clicked submit... and nothing happened. I appeared to have submitted my information correctly and set up a widget, yet it was nowhere to be found!

Now, I'm a fairly savvy Internet user - but this process left me feeling confused and annoyed.

The next issue is that even if by some miracle you successfully create a widget, by default it is hidden away. Many apps can only be put into a user's "Boxes" tab, which is not the default tab when you visit a user's Facebook profile. I very rarely click the "Boxes" tab on my friends pages - do you?

Some apps can be moved to your wall, the default page for your Facebook profile page. For example I did this with my Goodreads widget.

The third major issue is that widgets are often slow to update, if they update at all. My Goodreads widget often takes hours to update, but my music one sometimes doesn't update at all.

Why Can't Facebook Users Have Decent Widgets?

The beauty of the current Web is that you can use different services and have the data flow through Facebook; and any other social network, such as Twitter or MySpace. This actually works quite well for individual items posted to a user's Facebook wall. Here for example is my review of Inception, written in GetGlue (a service where you can 'like' movies, books, music and a lot more) and posted to my Facebook wall:

This review was available on my wall only for a day or two, before it got pushed off the wall by newer content. Which is a shame, because this type of content could easily be more persistent on our Facebook profiles - via widgets.

Wouldn't it be neat to have a Goodreads widget showing all my latest books, a GetGlue widget with my latest movie reviews, and so on. At least, that's what I want on my Facebook profile and I think I'm a typical media consumer.

The sad fact is, though, that currently Facebook widgets either don't exist (GetGlue does not have a Facebook widget), or if they do exist they're hard to find and confusing to set up (My Delicious) and/or clunky and prone to breakage (e.g. Goodreads).

Do you agree that Facebook widgets have been a big let-down?

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

The big change he's seen recently, he told us, is the concept of the feed as the center of our online interaction. We spend more time letting information passively approach us, by way of our friends, than actively searching for it. At the same time, by the very nature of the "feed", we share information for our friends to see, who see it as part of their feed.

"Consumers have transitioned or added on top of email the idea of a feed," he told us.

Yovanno said that Gigya has been working with Microsoft recently on its social strategy and he expects to see Microsoft's take on a feed interface in the near future.

Gigya recently changed its direction to focus primarily on social media and interaction, so it's betting on the fact that the feed will become ever more important in driving traffic.

Social Media Is The New Search

"Social media is representing a larger and larger mix of traffic compared to search," Yovanno said. "Sites are starting to wake up to the fact that they need to make some of those same level of investments in social as they did for search."

Whereas search engine optimization was the primary focus of sites in search of traffic, many are now realizing that social interaction is quickly becoming a driving force.

What Gigya provides to this end is a way to not only let users login to a website using a number of different social media identities, from Twitter to LinkedIn to Facebook Connect, but also to create content that will be seen on those sites' feeds without ever leaving the website they're on.

A simple example of this can be seen on this article. If you log in using Facebook Connect to leave a comment, after you enter the comment and click "Send" a little window will pop up allowing you to share your comment in your Facebook feed.

Gigya 4 - The New Features

Gigya allows users to sign into a website using a number of different social identities, including LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo! and OpenID in more than 20 different languages. One they're logged in, Gigya also provides a number of on-site widgets to allow for interaction and sharing, from inviting friends from other social media sites to chatting to sharing content in an off-site stream. Then, after everything is said and done, Gigya's new social optimization platform provides you with analytics on how users are interacting with your content, other users, and their social networks.

"Our business, at the core, is a technology of connectivity," Yovanno explained. "We create an abstract layer on top of Facebook Connect, LinkedIn's open platform, Twitter ... and we give a website a single API to write to."

The provision of a so-called "super API" is clutch to the emerging social network atmosphere we find ourselves in today.

Yovanno pointed out that there are a number of networks available and, even though Facebook is the leading social network, it entirely depends on the audience for what network will be the most popular when users are given a choice. The more choices a website offers, the more likely a user will chose to log in using their social identity and therefor be able to share information about the site on their feed.

The "super API", then, is key to providing as many login options as possible without having to constantly keep up with changing requirements from an ever-growing number of social networks.

Perhaps we were a bit premature in saying that Facebook was going to become your "one true login", as services like Gigya will make sure that you'll be able to continue using any number of social network identities to sign in and share. In the end, we find it more likely that the number of logins will continue to grow and Gigya's gamble will ultimately pay off.

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.

1. YouTube
2. Blog Page Widget
3. Google Ad Sense
4. Flickr Lightbox
5. Meebo Chat Room
6. Google Maps
7. Skype Me!
8. Google Video
9. Wufoo Form
10. Collect Donation Widget

It's a little surprising that there's no mention of Facebook or Twitter widgets, but perhaps in a few more months they will be in Yola's top 10.

For a more consumer-focused look at the most popular widgets, we checked out Widgetbox's all-time Most Popular List. Widgetbox provides widgets for social sites - including MySpace, Blogger, Facebook, WordPress, TypePad and iGoogle. Their top 10 shows that gaming, fun and pregnancy tickers (!) are most popular.

1. Super Mario Game
2. Baby Ticker - The Baby Countdown Pregnancy Ticker
3. cyber-pet
4. Mario Time Trial
5. Maukie - the virtual cat
6. Bubbles
7. Baby & Pregnancy Countdown Ticker
8. MP3 Player
9. Swidget 1.0
10. Super Mario Bros (with Luigi)

Neither list is especially surprising, but it's good to see that widgets are being well utilized by mainstream people.

Let us know if you have a favorite web widget and if so, where do you host it?

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.

Anyone who chooses to read the virtual book from the widget will have to complete and submit a four-field membership form, but it's a one-click process that then redirects the user straight to the book. Another downer is that the widget does take over the screen. Once you commit to reading the book, you're done browsing in that window until you close the widget. Nevertheless, it's a fun and interesting tool, and the negative side effects are negligible.

The implications of social online book-reading are many-fold, for example, virtual book clubs and organizational uses. However, the benefit of the widget is that of exposure. For every book embedded on a blog, publishers get a wider audience and more marketing /sales opportunities as more people are exposed to their BookGlutton'd books, and users are exposed to something a bit more substantial than a 250-word scannable masterpiece like this one.

Google, of course, already offers a similar service with Google Friend Connect, though this offers far more features than just the ability to leave comments. Google also allows users to sign in with an OpenID account, as well as with accounts from other vendors, including Yahoo and AOL. In the announcement, Facebook stresses that this is just the first of a number of social widgets based on Facebook Connect that the company is planning to release in the near future.

It is important to note that other commenting services like JS-Kit already allow users to use their Facebook Connect logins - something that Facebook actually acknowledges in its announcement.

Features

Publishers will be able to customize the widget and moderate comments, though it is not clear what this moderation will look like. Users without a Facebook Connect ID will also be able to leave comments, but we will have to wait and see how well Facebook's widget will be able handle the inevitable spam that will come with this.

One nice feature of the Facebook Connect widget is that your comments are not only posted to your Facebook profile, but that additional comments that your friends make on Facebook in reference to your comment will also appear on the originating site. This, as Nick O'Neill points out, is similar to what a number of blog plugins like IntenseDebate are doing with comments left on Friendfeed right now. For publishers, this also means that their content is going to get a wider exposure on Facebook.

However, while being able to use the Facebook Connect ID to sign into a comments system is nice, most publishers are probably looking for a system that can handle a wider range of sign-on credentials. Facebook is now a member of the OpenID Foundation, but the widget only supports Facebook Connect IDs.

Breaking out of the Silo

What is most important about this announcement, though, is that Facebook continues to open up its platform to third parties. Earlier this month, third-party developers got access to users' status updates, notes, and links. Now, Facebook is allowing bloggers and publishers to implement some of Facebook's core features outside of Facebook's own site. Facebook use to be a closed off silo, but this is changing rapidly right now and it will be interesting to see how Facebook's users will react to this.

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.

Some publishers might hesitate to let users easily subscribe to such a filtered feed from their site - but those are often people who wouldn't subscribe at all if you didn't give them such a personalized option.

We've embedded the widget below - give it a try and you'll see what a powerful experience it offers.

The new widget also comes with a WordPress plug-in that will display each post's Postrank score in your WordPress dashboard. That's pretty hot.

Using this widget out of the box is really easy and it should fit nicely on your blog's sidebar. Unfortunately changing the size of the widget to put it anywhere else is a real pain - you can see all the white space above. It made us quite angry, in fact! The company said there was a bug that should be fixed promptly though, so hopefully all problems will be solved. There really are too few customization options. It would also be nice to be able to hover over the post rank numbers and see a popup of criteria for that score as well, as you can on the main site.

That minor frustration aside, we're very impressed with this new widget's speed and functionality. We expect to see it on a lot of blog sidebars around the web soon.

In addition to displaying account balances, this new gadget, now available for download from Fidelity Labs, can also be configured to display alerts on certain account-related activities, including trade notifications and price trigger alerts. Customers can choose to either add the Secure Gadget as a standalone gadget or they can click a button to add a customized Fidelity Tab to their iGoogle. The tab includes the gadget itself, plus two RSS feeds from Fidelity: Fidelity Investor's Weekly and Fidelity Investment Insight Podcast.

Fidelity iGoogle tab (click to view larger):

To use the gadget, customers log in using their SSN or Customer ID and PIN, as they would do online. That information is not saved on Google's servers on any other 3rd party servers, says Fidelity.

The Fidelity Labs web site states that they developed the gadget, but it looks to us like it came from WorkLight, an enterprise 2.0 startup whose banking 2.0 survey data we reviewed earlier this year. At that time, the survey results showed that nearly half of the respondents said they would use web 2.0 tools if offered by their current bank. We also took note of the secure banking gadgets they had under development - gadgets that greatly resemble this one from Fidelity - which we considered to be very promising technology.

The release of Fidelity's gadget may hint at the beginnings of a new trend in banking - making banking 2.0 mainstream. Along with numerous web 2.0 services for managing finances, many of today's banking customers can manage their money from their mobile phones while other customers are receiving personalized recommendations on their iPhones, as well. However, none of the services offered so far have the potential for mainstreaming banking 2.0 the way a Google homepage gadget could. It's already a technology most everyone is familiar with and it's being offered by the financial institution itself, which should help customers feel comfortable about its security. We hope more financial institutions will start offering gadgets of their own in the near future.

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.

SplashCast has plans to carry 20 popular Hulu shows from a variety of networks. For NBC, the shows include The Office, Saturday Night Live, 30 Rock, Chuck, and Heroes. FOX offerings (which I'm betting will get the most play with the social media crowd) include The Simpsons, Family Guy, Arrested Development, House, Bones, Fringe, and Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles. Additional shows include Battlestar Galactica, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and Nip/Tuck, among others. More shows will be added in the coming months. Each show will be wrapped in a custom SplashCast player that matches the look and feel of the show.

So Hulu gets a simple vehicle for broader distribution. What's in it for SplashCast, aside from the fact that they get to work with one of the most popular - and also completely legal - online video content providers?

For one, SplashCast gets to deliver the social features around the shows. When users are communicating with one another about their favorite characters and episodes, they'll be doing that within the SplashCast chrome, which gives SplashCast some very interesting data points on who is watching what and how they feel about it.

But there's also an opportunity for SplashCast to explore additional ad revenue on the embeddable players. SplashCast has a great deal of experience in delivering high-end branded players, so I'm sure that they have some creative ideas beyond the standard "brought to you by..." advertising options.

Will users adopt this new offering? It's hard to say, but it's likely. SplashCast currently estimates 10 million consumers per month access SplashCast channels, primarily via Facebook embedded channels. A number of these embedded entertainment channels feature popular musical artists - people with whom social network users want to associate themselves. No doubt, the Hulu shows will effect a similar attraction.

For now, we'll just have to wait and see if the shows that Hulu has offered up inspire the social networking crowd to embed them and - more importantly - watch them.

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.

We're very bullish on Meebo in general but this campaign, the Seventeen Magazine implementation in particular, is pretty uninspiring. We hope that when Meebo makes an appearance on PopularMechanics.com it will be a little more interesting. That wouldn't be hard.

Meebo tells a good story about huge increases in time on site for publishers that install their chat widgets, and that makes sense. Chat gives people a reason to stay on one page, if it's done well and there are a good number of people chatting then it's genuinely more interactive than anything a publisher can offer by themselves.

Meebo has a history of offering an interesting mix of aiming at the mainstream while still innovating in ways that are thought provoking for early adopters.

Bringing web IM to big mainstream websites is an interesting step in the evolution of publishing. We think it makes sense. We hope the big publishers can figure out what to do with it.

Sitemeter is a free web analytics tool for keeping track of your site's visitors. A bug found in both the javascript and HTML widget made thousands of sites using Sitemeter inaccessible earlier today including popular blogs such as PerezHilton.com, Gizmodo, Valleywag, and Problogger. When users would visit any sites using Sitemeter, they would be presented with an error message pop-up:

Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site http://www.sitename.com

Operation aborted

Pissing on its Own Reputation?

The situation brings to light a lot of concerns about the internet and dependency on web products and services. However, the biggest concern is for Sitemeter as a company and how they decided to handle the situation with silence. For one, Sitemeter has made no moves to inform their public of what's going on. For those not as tech savvy as some of us, they were probably hit the hardest due to searching for a solution to a problem that they couldn't readily identify. Bad press for Sitemeter? Any press could be good press, but there's no doubt that this story and more will rank high in Google and Yahoo searches when users are searching for reviews about Sitemeter. Is this really what they want prospective customers to see?

That said, however, Obama has dominated the online discussion since day one. It would appear that when it comes to spreading his campaign message via widgets, there's no exception to the rule -- Obama widgets are far and away the most popular. (Though, note that the data on this graph is based on the candidate's most popular widget in the Widgetbox system, and not averaged across multiple widgets -- so it's really only good for looking at a general trend.)

We tried to match peaks and valleys in widget installs to news events to see if there was any correlation, which is really difficult with this data. It looks like Obama saw a growing number of installs in the run up to the Ohio and Texas primaries (entering which he'd won something like 11 or 12 contests in a row) -- then flat-lined for a month after he lost them. Clinton saw a modest bump after Super Tuesday in February where she scored huge wins in New York and California. Sen. John McCain saw a big dip the first week in March, which coincided with his becoming the presumptive nominee and President Bush's endorsement (we'll let you guess which might have turned people off his widget...).

But what's important about this data, is the trends. Starting with the Iowa caucuses just after New Year's, Barack Obama has seen his widgets spread steadily across the web. And even though his campaign does push the widgets on his site, 80-90% of new installs are coming via widgets embedded on non-official blogs -- they're coming from the grassroots rather than via the campaign itself. Clinton and McCain widgets are also being spread virally by supporters, though clearly not as fast. It does look like McCain supporters are doing a better job of embracing new web technologies than they were earlier in the election cycle, though -- the first McCain widgets appeared on Widgetbox in mid-February and have enjoyed mostly steady upward growth since.

This is really just another data point to watch to gauge which candidate has momentum. It's really quite amazing to look a things like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and widgets to measure a US presidential election -- the last time around most of these tools didn't exist (or at least weren't nearly as important).

Instead, he says, OpenSocial's goal is to standardize widget development. According to Canter, many of the social networks that have signed on to OpenSocial never intended to open their network and allows users to transport data, regardless of whether that was part of Google's plans. Rather, networks wanted access to Google's OpenSocial gadgets (their word for widgets) in an attempt to strike back against Facebook's successful platform.

This is something Marshall Kirkpatrick picked up on shortly after Google announced OpenSocial. "As some people have told me tonight, it may have been more accurate to call this 'OpenWidget' - though the press wouldn't have been as good. We've been waiting for data and identity portability - is this all we get?" he wondered in November.

And if Google is really just trying to standardize widget development, are they the ones we want at the helm? Snipperoo's Ivan Pope argues that "we'd be better off working from the ground up rather than getting suckered by a Google et al inspired bit of marketing flammery." I'm inclined to agree. Other than the seeming lack of data portability as part of the OpenSocial initiative, one of the other chief concerns that our own Marshall Kirkpatrick talked about was whether Google was exercising leadership or control.

"Still remaining is the question of Google's control over the standards creation process. It's not possible that one of the largest companies in the US and the largest in this consortium would act entirely out of concern for the world at large," he wrote.

So if OpenSocial is really not about data portability and interoperability between networks (except as far as widget creation is concerned), we'll have to look elsewhere for that. But that's not to say that OpenSocial is a total wash -- widget standardization isn't such a bad idea. As we wrote in November, there are plenty of winners when OpenSocial is adopted. "The winners of OpenSocial are Google (who now has hooks into a large number of social networking sites that reach hundreds of millions of people -- whom Google surely hopes will one day be viewing Google ads), users (who now have access to social apps on networks that previously didn't have developer APIs), app developers," we said.

The question is, do we want Google to be leading the way in widget standardization? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

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.

Yahoo! also soft-launched an updated version of the widget gallery about 10 days ago, and I was told that their ultimate goal is to become the clearinghouse for all desktop widgets that run on their engine, including those ported from web platforms. Right now they list about 4,300 widgets, but that number should grow once web developers start porting their widgets to the desktop.

Allowing developers to take web widgets offline is good news for both developers and users, and will not only mean more widgets available to desktop users, but also more developers creating widgets for the desktop, since now web developers can create desktop widgets by using scripting languages they are familiar with. What would be great is if Yahoo! could go the other way in the next update and make Yahoo! desktop widgets work on the web. Perhaps even on MyYahoo!

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.

Where the Evil Is

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?