HungryMachine is a web development group specialized in Ruby on Rails and they are very into facebook and decided to develop and release a widget, with the particularity that the widget debuted only on Facebook. making it a widget to facebook only widget, something that goes completely the other way around to what you usually are used to. because the commong ground is to release for the web and then release a facebook version, but they seem so comfortable with facebook and i guess this would be the way to make a point across.
The widget in question allows you to show what you are reading, what you have already read by sectioning a bookshelf to share with others, that way your facebook contacts can check it out.
as with al things Facebook, the word widget should come with the word module along it.
It is a good widget but not a usal one and the particularity of being facebook exclusive, makes it worth of checking it out and is interesting how facebook has affected the widgetosphere (yeah, i said it) too.
Niall Kennedy from widgets live and the upcoming widget summit fame has done a very interesting and informative post about widgets history in a loose stringed but very well researched time table that starts in 1984 up to 2007.
My only observation is that even if 2007 is not finished yet i would have added Silverlight, Flex and AIR widgets already..but i guess if it were point by point the timetable would have hundreds points of reference and 2007 would certainly be the busiest year so far.
Darren Rowse got the scoop that Adsense is also coming up for YouTube Embeddables, showing what i was talking about Google Diversificating its Advertising as a way to mantain supremacy in the web, because aftel all it really don´t matter if everyone uses your services if you are not producing money in order to assure that you can grow without interruptions.
This YouTube initiative it is targeted for Publishers (Original Content Directors) with certain YouTube cred levels (high ones) so don´t expect it to be allowed for everyone right now.
In the end this also mark another important landmark for not only user generated content, but for widgets too by showing how hard is the push from the mainstream companies to enforce monetization.
I can safely say that the days of free and naive playing with widgets is over because now if you like a video and you would like to share it, if you spread it, you will be spreading wealth to others and in very specific cases also to yourself. but for those not wanting to be in that game, their only option will be to download and reupload the videos into their own players when allowed.
Just a bit more proof that widgets are becoming a very important marketing tool. The CW network has decided to leverage the popularity of widgets in order to promote new shows for the fall season. They have also released a number of widgets featuring some already popular prime time shows.
Gossip Girl, Reaper, Life is Wild, Girlfriends, Aliens in America, Online Nation and The Game are all new shows that are featured in these colorful, attractive and interactive widgets. Each widget features a preview video, link to a show themed wallpaper and a ‘Viral’ link so your readers can easily grab their own copy from yours.
The ‘Featured’ widget is the Gossip Girls widget. It features some preview videos and a rather different feature. Celebrity news from People magazine. This ‘Gossip’ is presented via headline and up to two lines of text within the widget itself. Each headline is linked to the actual story on People.com. The website for People magazine.
Shows from previous seasons such as Top Model, Beauty and the Geek, Smallville, Supernatural and Everybody Hates Chris also have widgets. Each widget is themed accordingly as well.
All of the CW widgets use Flash, making them friendly for most blogs, social profiles and even Myspace.
Jajah has just pumped up their VOIP service offerings even more spreading to blogs and websites fro today on by allowing you to place a jajah Button, a widget badge that replicates the service module that will be familiar to Jajah users.
This does shows how much ground jajah has won lately thinks in part to the now infamous Skype outage that made jajah new users and usage rates to skyrocket and put them beyond their proyected marks.
the offering of a widget for open calls does shows that they are confident in the uptime and quality of the service enough to go all for it because, as simple as it may sounds there are other services that sole angle is precisely that.
the widget works in the same way your main module in jajah dashboard works with the difference that in this case there is only one way, the place you are calling from, you choose the country and your number, push cal and jajah operator will call you and call the jajah user to provide the call to both.
Since i am a Jajah user myself i can say it does works as expected and that there are n surprises just yet, i will place my personal jajah button, don´t expect me to answer all calls, becausa jajah also allows me to fix the rates of the calls i want to recieve, set the countires and also even if i have agreed to recieve them, decline or send a busy message if i change my mind at any point of the process.
this is a everywhere widget (myspace,blog, website) done in flash and it can be customized complete in several color levels and sizes.
In what started as a IM client for certain Apple branded phone now has evolved into a web Multi IM client of it´s own, there are a lot of those. but there is a interesting thing about FlickIM client, and that comes in the form of Modular widgets,allowing widget integration into chat.so, you can add widget to what seems like a part start page, part meebo IM client and enjoy funtionality into the chats like having recomendation or links served from the widgets in your conversations, along other things to come.
I wish i could recommend you to flock over there and try it out alredy but the Im client leaves way too much to be desired, it has to come a long way before it can replace previous Meebo or KoolIM users or even new AIRtalker users.
But is a interesting angle to launch what previously was a iPhone AOL IM client and that is surely to be followed by others in the Web IM client niche.
The World Visitors Map Widget uses a colorful and interactive map of the world to show which countries your site visitors are coming from. It tracks and pinpoints the location of every visitor to your site, then these results are added up and show up on your map as both a color and a number (on mouseover). The darker the color the more visitors you have from that country. Drill-down further by clicking on the continent, country, state or province.
Widgetbox unveils devShare, a revenue sharing program for widgets
Widgetbox, the largest source of widgets on the web, has partnered with RockYou to offer revenue sharing for widget developers. RockYou will sell advertising in Facebook apps created with Widgetbox’s new ‘App Accelerator’. Developers will split the revenue 50/50 with Widgetbox.
The App Accelerator is designed to make creating Facebook apps straight forward and easy. Cool!
Opinion
Here’s another entrant in the race to exploit Facebook. Yeah, you can make money with it, but you won’t strike it rich. Widgetbox will though!
I’m tired of Facebook apps at this point. Who has the time to sift through thousands of these things and finally find one that you like, just to discover that you really have no options and the thing doesn’t really appear to change the appearance of your profile. Remember the first generic foods in the grocery stores? Black and white labels that said things like ‘Beer’ and ‘Pretzels’. This is what I see when I am on Facebook looking at my profile. ‘Facebook profile #5441287…’ Blah.
Musestorm is one of those widget centric companies that have come a long way in just one year as Derek first post about them confirms passing from offering widgets to what today they call a content engagement platform, which is pretty much in layman terms like hiring a agency for your widgets, they get you help to develop them, the help you to market them, they help you to deliver them.
Musestorm is a very proactive agency, but if you prefer to read the explanation from the PR sheet, i can comply to that too:
“The MuseStorm Content Engagement Platform is an end-to-end solution for content and widget syndication.
By handling everything from widget and application creation, to distribution and analytics as well as monetization, the service frees publishers and marketers to focus on what they do best: creating engaging content and messages for their users.
The tightly integrated platform modules provide unique benefits such as detailed interaction metrics and flexible options for advertising integration. “
there are now a lot of permutations from once develop only widget start up to now widget syndication managers and also widget marketing, but Musestorm is trying to go beyond that and offer a more rounded option first. and if you are into the idea of developing a widget, they do come as a good reference on where to turn.
USA Network and Clearspring bring you this cool ‘Fridge Magnet’ widget.
The Wussy Magnets Fridge Magnet widget allows you to create some great Ice Box Poetry.
As you can see, this widget lets you choose from random words that can be pasted together to form all sorts of clever sayings. I’m positive that I could come up with something sick and demented to paste on this widget.
The widget saves peoples creations and allows you to roll through the archives to see what kinda crap people are pasting on it. You could almost use this as a type of crude, secret message board. Cool!
Why Dr. Steve-O?
Not exactly sure why. I assume it’s because Dr. Steve-O is crazy and this is a great way to promote the premier of his new reality series. The big night is Oct 1st 10 pm CST on USA
Dr. Steve-O also has a ‘Daily Dose’ widget where he posts a new ‘Steveism’ daily.
Everywhere widget
This little widget uses Flash, making it Myspace friendly. (I have added it to the Fun Myspace Widgets list)
Pictobrowser is embeddable service that offer you a way to make a slideshow with your flickr pictures or with other flickr pictures, it got the usual filters so you can put is by tag or set or all and produce a Pictobrowser that is the very name of the Slideshow App that denotes a minimalistic and refined way of doing things, you see it and you now is the work of a not commercial entity, there is no branding it it, there is no back linking to the site implied in it and it is even viral in a true and clever way, you can generate your Pictobrowser code from any Pictobrowser you get to find along. so this Pictobroser i will place here will allow you to create yours on the spot and even let you preview it in another tab.
It is really one of those apps that do feel personal and you feel that they have been created with that sensibility in mind.
You can emebed Pictobrowser anywhere and put it into your Myspace, blog, site, you name it, and please do so because it is pretty light and responsive unlike other more flashy and branded slideshows we have seen.
And what a better way to recommend it that by let you try one here, and that also sports one cool as hell Retro Arcade gallery from the 80`s that makes me way too nostaligc..
coComent, the main Commentosphere Tracking start up has now launched their very delayed 2.0 version of their service and along it, they have refreshed their widgets.
coComent is a service that tries to leverage the way you track your and other comments, log them by putting a Community as the backend of the service, so not only you can track comments but people can be able to see what you are commenting and where you are commenting. it is another level of Social Aggregation that has taken long to catch up, but cocoment hopes that the features and improved service of their 2.0 version allows that to happen.
So, if you were a early coComent user that lost track of the service or want to check out where your commenters come from and where they go after visiting you, here are 4 widgets to do so that are self explanatory:
VideoMap widget links friends and their videos across social sites
YourTrumanShow today announces the creation and release of their new ‘VideoMap’ widget. This widget is designed to further link people on social sites such as Myspace, Facebook and others. The Key ingredient of this widget is the ‘Graphical Video Relationship Map’ (a mouthful)
This component allows you to view who links to you and what videos they are sharing.
VideoMap developers:
VideoMap? lets users open the widget and see themselves in the center of the map, then they can opt from two views. In the first, they are the hub and can see their connections to friends across the Web. In a tray below them, they see their own collection of clips from anywhere on the Internet. When the user clicks on a friend, that friend?s collection appears in the tray.
In the second view users are still in the center of the map. This time, however, they see the collections of their friends and the corresponding connections to those collections. When they select a clip that interests them, they then see its owner in the tray below.
In both cases, it?s a quick and simple process to add content to a personal collection.
The developers also hint at future monetization models based upon collected data about user preferences. Whether this is revenue for the user or for the developer is yet to be determined.
worldofpop.com offers us a couple of Quiz Widgets. One is aptly named…The Daily Quiz. Basically you answer 5 different questions about the world of pop culture. Register and start building up a point total. Gain a top score like the user Melkay, who has over 600,000 points and you will be featured on the main page. World of Pop could be considered a social gaming site.
BlogRush introduces ‘Flavors’. Flavors are simply multiple color options for the BlogRush widget. If you haven’t heard about the BlogRush widget, it’s basically a ‘Traffic Generator’. It lists headlines from other blogs that are ’similar’ to yours (based on a category) There has been many blog posts about this widget. We haven’t written about it yet because we want to perform a thorough analysis of its properties and effects. Many bloggers are reporting less than desirable returns only after a few days use. Interesting!
Reverbnation is pushing out a widget for bands to promote their music. Its called the ‘Tune Widget’ and its FREE to use.
Any band or group can use this widget to let users listen to their music, view tour dates and locations, sign up for mailings and even watch videos. This is a Viral widget! …and can be placed just about anywhere. With the ‘Quick Post’ feature you can add this to your Myspace profile in no time at all. Also supported are Blogger, Friendster, Orkut, Netvibes, PageFlakes etc… Reverbnation/tunewidget
Ron Paul virtual magazine widget. This widget can be found on the Ron Paul 2008 Myspace page. It’s a Flash widget that works really well. Unfortunately it takes up a ton of space Ron Paul 2008.com
The Snocap music store widget. Sell music to your readers and make a killing….well maybe not. But you might have some fun. snocap/widgetSphere: Related Content
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