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?

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.

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.

There is nothing random (pun intended) about the Random House book widget. It is business engineering meets technology at its best. The widget is carefully crafted to:

• Showcase Random House books everywhere online
• Market the Random House brand
• Let users preview books
• Let users buy books
• Spread the widget virally

The widget creators were focused on making the Random House widget useful to their customers. They built in search inside the widget and also 'browse this book' features. It is quite an impressive set of features to pack inside a widget. Take a look:

Insight - The Random House Book Service

The Random House widget is powered by a web service called insight. This service exposes a set of programming interfaces for searching and browsing the contents of Random House Books. Insight is an impressive, ongoing effort to index, digitize, distribute and set the terms for using book content online. Developers can query Insight using a REST API and get back XML responses. Here are some examples of supported requests:

• How many books and pages from the archive contain the word "Ulysses?"
• Which books contain the keyword, "Ulysses," and what is the context in which it first appears?
• What pages of the book, The Iliad, contain the keyword, "Ulysses," and what is the context in which it appears?
• The full-page image of pageID 256 of The Iliad.
• The thumbnail image of page 256 of The Iliad.
• Where can I find links to the five pages before and after page 256 of The Iliad?
• Where can I find links to all of the sample pages made available from The Iliad.

From the above use cases it is clear that Insight is a web service that offers a specific, vertical interface for book search. This is its strength and really the way that vertical web services should be done.

Widgets and Web Services - the way into the New Web Ecosystem

It is difficult not to generalize what Random House is doing. Exposing its information as a Web Service and building a Widget to deliver microcontent to millions of web pages is the new way that serious companies should play online. A Web Service serves a few purposes, but the most important one is opening up the data in a controlled way. This is what Amazon has been doing for years and Facebook just did recently. We covered this topic extensively in our When Web Sites Become Web Services post.

Building a Widget on top of the Web Service is also important, not only because it lets the company create a viral distribution channel, but because it offers a sanity check for correctness of the Web Service. If the widget developer runs into issues with the Web Service, so will everyone else. By creating a widget and exercising the Web Service, the company gets to test it out first.

Conclusion

Its great to see an older and bigger company that gets widgets and web services. Random House is leveraging its information in a controlled way to businesses and exposes it in a viral way to end users. This is savvy and economical. Their widget implementation nails the user experience, packing the key functions of searching and browsing into the widget. The only thing that would be great to add to the widget is user and expert reviews, but this does not seem to be the information that Random House has.

Let us know what you think about the Random House strategy. Also please share other great examples of web service and widget combinations that you have seen lately.

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.

Give me an example!

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.

Google Adsense has made a lot of money for website owners since its inception. It is probably the most widely distributed widget around. You can sign up for an Adsense account and relevant adverts are shown where you place the widget on your site. You then get a share of the revenue generated with Google. Whole sites and services exist today on the web that are solely funded by their share of revenue from displaying the Adsense widget. Estimated value? Billions!

The FeedBurner widget shows you how many people are subscribed to your RSS feed. It doesn't have much use and is not very accurate in a lot of cases. But that little number it displays is still one of the biggest bragging rights available to a successful blogger, in spite of those bloggers who game the system.

Image slideshow widgets from slide.com

Widget Platforms

If you are planning on building a widget or getting one for your site, there are a number of great websites to get you started. All of the following have vast directories of widgets to choose from and will help you distribute, track and monitor your widget should you choose to build one.

Snipperoo is just getting going at the moment, but already they have a directory of over 3,000 widgets to choose from and a very flexible method of delivering your widget. Ivan Pope (Snipperoo founder) also runs an excellent blog which discusses all things widgets.

Spring Widgets is a platform put together by Fox interactive. They don't have a big selection of widgets at the moment, but their list is growing day by day. They only support flash widgets, but they have a cool desktop runtime that you can download. It allows you to grab any Spring Widget from the web and use it on your desktop. What's really interesting about Spring Widgets is that they are owned by Fox, which also owns MySpace. With MySpace kicking off so much third party content from their site lately, I foresee them making Spring Widgets the only way to put a widget onto MySpace - which will help them control the flow of content through the site.

ClearSpring has just served their 3 billionth widget as of this month. Impressive stuff. They have a nice clean interface for deploying your widget and offer some really cool tracking metrics.

WidgetBox also has a big collection of widgets to choose from for your site. They also provide some nice reports on your widget usage. Users can grab widgets they like from any site that has a widgetbox widget and pop it into their own sidebar or Netvibes/Pageflakes page, for example.

Mobile Widgets

Nokia's new platform Widsets is a great example of what can be done with mobile widgets. You simply download their free software to your mobile and choose from a host of widgets. Once you hook your phone up with them, you can log into their site at any time and choose which widgets you want - and it pushes them out to your phone. This is a really great service. I was easily able to create a custom Read/WriteWeb widget for my phone in minutes, using their studio.

Heres a YouTube video Widget of Kaj from Widsets explaining how it all works

Widget Commerce

Of course widgets have been in use in the world of advertising for a long time. Companies like DoubleClick have used javascript widgets to deliver their adverts to sites for years. The modern day king of the commerce widget is of course the Google Adsense widget. Here are a few other players in the market:

Auction Ads allows you to display live eBay auctions on your site, with a share of eBay affiliate fees coming your way.

Tumri lets their users create customized widgets to promote products on their site from a range of partners; such as Overstock, Shop.com, and Walmart. Revenue is then shared out between the website owner and Tumri.

Nooked is a newcomer to the market. They are just beginning to roll out their feed commerce widgets across a network of partner blogs. They are one to watch for the future. [disclosure: Read/WriteWeb's editor Richard MacManus is an advisor to Nooked]

HomePage Sites

Sites like Pageflakes, Netvibes, Your Minis, iGoogle and My Yahoo allow you to choose from many different widgets (including email, news, weather) and build your own homepage for your browser.

Conclusion

I have only touched on what's happening in the world of widgets in this post. Widgets are literally everywhere these days, in all shapes and sizes. For the moment widgets are the new black, but they also come with their own inherent problems - such as scale. For example if someone with 100,000 visitors a day places your widget on their site, essentially you as the widget maker inherit that traffic. That's a good thing, but you need to be prepared to take the load. Slow loading widgets often cause problems on their host websites.

Another issue is one of style; some sites are becoming increasingly clogged with widgets that have no relation to each other - in terms of form or design. So the page as a whole can end up looking like a car crash.

But to finish on a positive note, widgets add a lot of functionality to your site. Functionality that you can pick and choose as you wish. They also add potential revenue streams for you, which is always a good thing.

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!

As you can see, the widget is very slick and interactive. It was built in Flash, which is the latest trend in widget production. Technologies like Flash and Silverlight are being used nowadays to create rich, interactive widgets such as the RateItAll ones. Note that you can see other examples of RateItAll widgets on their blog.

So what will the feedback widget do for bloggers and readers? The primary purpose is to let readers rate, review, and give feedback on a blog. Ratings and reviews can be submitted without ever leaving the blog - it's all done within the widget. The benefits to bloggers include getting coverage on RateItAll's website, which reportedly gets 800K monthly uniques (reviews posted through the widget also show up on RateItAll.com). Bloggers can also enhance community around their blog and get regular feedback from their readers, via the widget.

Conclusion: read/write widgets are the new black!

Read/write widgets are going to be the next big thing on the Web (but I would say that!). You can see the potential in, for example, the recently announced eBay ToGo widgets. As Alex Iskold noted in his review of eBay ToGo, right now eBay's widget falls short of a distributed auction - as it does not allow users to do a transaction within the widget. To transact, users need to click through to the eBay website. Alex remarked that eBay will probably address this in the next iteration and create a truly distributed auction system, i.e. a read/write widget. I too am expecting this kind of interactive, transactional widget to become common place - and before the year is out.

To get a RateItAll widget for your blog, sign up here. It's a closed beta for now, so you need to submit your email address.