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?

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%.

Gigya also shared with us the numbers when two major email and search providers, Yahoo and Google, are thrown into the login mix. Facebook still comes out with a majority, 53%, of the logins, while Twitter takes second place with 14%. Google and Yahoo! sneak in with 12% each and Myspace stumbles in with only 9% of the take.

In their note to us, they made sure to mention that when a site offers more options for logging in, more people do, providing a greater variety of data on its customer base.

We'd like to see if and how these numbers might change as more companies come out with competition to Facebook Connect and become more noticeable.

For the Google public badge, users can choose if they want the widget to show their location at a city-level only, or if they want to allow it to show their location more precisely. Given the public nature of the badge, this will surely raise some security concerns, especially when users choose to update their Latitude data automatically.

The Google Talk widget only uses the name of the city the user is currently staying in to update their status.

Google stresses that it takes its users privacy very seriously, but there can be no doubt that privacy concerns are currently limiting the mainstream appeal of many of these applications.

Google is clearly taking a very serious look at location aware services and according to today's blog post, the company plans to introduce more applications that can make use of one's Latitude data in the near future. Google is also soliciting new ideas from its users here.

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.

If there's any set of technology users who could kick the use of QR Codes into high gear it would be iPhone owners. Enamored of the some 25,000 applications now available in the iTunes App Store, iPhone users are happily downloading new apps all the time. The problem for developers isn't coercing people into believing that it's okay to install software on the phone - it's generating awareness that the software they created even exists. In other words, raising app awareness is a marketing problem.

When an application becomes popular, it gets featured on one or more of iTunes' "Top" lists which rank the hottest applications in their store overall and by category. But getting on these lists means first getting the message about your app out there. For some application developers, that means emailing every blogger and journalist who covers mobile technology hoping for a review. Others attend all the tech conferences they can, handing out numerous business cards.

But with iCandy's widget, there's now a third option for marketing an iPhone app in the offline world: QR codes. For those who don't know, a QR code is a type of barcode which can be easily scanned using a mobile phone's camera and accompanying third-party software. (iPhone users can check out apps like Optiscan, Neoreader, BeeTag, Xzing, 2D Sense, Barcode, Snapp, etc.)

How to Create a QR Code for an iPhone Application

For developers and marketers wishing to promote an application, they can do so using the iPhone App iCandy Card. The steps involved are simple:

1. Launch iCandy and select "Create Card."
2. With iTunes open, find your iPhone app and drag and drop its icon into the iCandy Print window. iCandy will create a QR code of the URL that connects back to the iTunes store.
3. Click 'Edit Item' to enter a relevant title and artwork.
4. Select your print layout.
5. Print to a local printer, disk, or Flickr.

Real-World Scenarios for Use

If creating and scanning barcodes with your mobile phone sounds too geeky for you, keep in mind this technology is inching its way closer to mainstream acceptance thanks to apps that scan the barcodes of products in order to do price comparisons. Consumers may even adopt the technology before the stores even know what's happening! The reason, obviously, is that in a down economy such as this, anything that could potentially save people money is likely to be given more of a chance than before...even these slightly "geekier" applications that may have been ignored in the past. Add to that the ease-of-use of iPhone applications and it's easy to see the still untapped potential of the QR code.

At iCandy, they suggest a couple of uses for their new app-to-QR-code widget, saying "imagine scanning a QR code on the ski lift tower that gets you a ski conditions app, or scanning a poster on the subway for a subway schedule app." But we're sure you can think of many more examples on your own. And with more businesses developing their own custom applications, we may not be too far off from a day when QR codes print on your receipts at your favorite store, show up on the menus at your favorite restaurants, or display in posters all over the city.

Well, perhaps we're getting a little ahead of ourselves here. Although QR code technology has taken off in certain markets around the world, most notably Japan, they've only recently gained popularity in the Middle East, Europe, and the U.S. The problem in these markets may not be the unwillingness of consumers to adopt the technology, but the lack of QR codes out in the real world which are available for scanning. With iCandy, generating the codes is a breeze, but now someone has to convince marketers that they might be worth trying out.

The enhancement is visible once you log in to your Lijit account. Just click on the 'search widget' button in the navigation bar and the new option will be obvious in the upper-right corner. Once you fill out the form with your (second) blog's details, the new widget can be customized and deployed.

Lijit warns that the widgets are still walled off in different accounts. This means you won't be able to see combined search results or statistics. However, this is still bound to be a big time-saver, since it means you don't have to remember and re-enter two sets of credentials.

In case you have more than one account already created, Lijit recommends you contact them via their Feedback page and they can help you merge them.