ReadWriteWeb

Quixey, an application search startup and makers of an accompanying suite of tools for app developers, is today announcing three more tools to aid in application discovery. These tools provide new ways for publishers and partners to integrate app search into their own websites, and include everything from a simple widget up to fully customized solutions built to a specific publisher's requirements.

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.

In an effort to add one more story to the list of reasons why Facebook already rules the world and can stop trying, we find that Facebook is the social-network-login of choice by nearly 2-to-1.

Widget provider Gigya sent us some numbers from their social network login tool and in a three company competition, Facebook came away with 65% of the traffic, Myspace with 18% and Twitter with 17%.

Google released two new features today for its Google Latitude location-sharing service. You can now put a public location badge with your current location on your blog or web site, and you can now automatically update your Google Talk status with your current location as well. For Blogger users, Google provides a one-click install option for the public badge. Both the public badge and the Google Talk app are currently only available in the US.

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.

The latest news from a company called iCandy (previous coverage) is a tool that lets you easily create QR codes for iPhone applications. By simply dragging an app out of iTunes and into their iCandy widget, a QR code for that application will be automatically generated. With this code, which could be printed on anything from business cards to posters and stickers, you can market your iPhone application offline, out in the real world.

The Lijit team rolled out today the ability to manage more than one widget with just one sign-in. Lijit is a combined search and statistics package for your blog rolled into a widget that's easy to install. Today's update has been a big request for a long time, according to their blog post.