Found widgetnest while looking for political widgets
As you can tell, widgetnest.net has political widgets. In fact they have a widget for each known candidate for the 2008 Presidential election in the U.S.
The first thing I noticed about the widget is the clean appearance and the animation. Scrolling widgets catch the eye and generate interest. This is ideal if you are trying to get more people to adopt your widgets.
The next thing I noticed is the flash programming. Flash makes these widgets ‘Everywhere widgets’. Meaning you can paste them into just about any blog, social profile or website.
I looked further into the site and found an absolute treasure trove of widgets. Scrolling RSS widgets, Netscape Top Stories, Digg friends, Twitter widget and even a Jaiku widget. The only widget with any custom options would be the RSS widget. I believe you get to choose border color, background color and of course the RSS feed.
When I saw all of these widgets it made me wonder how I could have missed them all these months. At least I think months. They have quite the gallery to be a new start-up, so I assume they have been around for a few.
I Can Has Cheezeburger? They even have an LOL cats widget that displays the latest animal images uploaded to the ICHC site. That is so cool!
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The Internet is a small world. I was just looking at a post on TechCrunch about Feedjit and saw your comment and clicked through to your page. Lo and behold, WidgetNest – which I am a founder of – is the top story. Weird! Much thanks. And nice blog.
Sorry, I meant to edit the last comment I left. WidgetNest started in May of this year (2007) and we currently serve over 7 million widgets a month, but that is obviously not nearly as much as some of the others out there. Cheers!
Dave, How is it that WidgetNest has been around since May 07 and it has escaped my attention? Of course there are hundreds of widget related stories everyday. So who knows? Glad that I found this one though!
I would imagine that is has something to do with the fact that we aren’t a widget platform like SpringWidgets or “gallery” like Widgetbox. We just make widgets. Usually we make these widgets for third party companies that then use them on their own sites. So, we while we do have a small gallery of “public” widgets, the majority of our work isn’t really credited to us.
So how do you get the word out about your products? Are you actively pursuing companies to gain work?
Actually, that is what is remarkable about this whole thing. WidgetNest started as a side project between me and two of my friends. Without doing any self promotion (well, very little) except for the widgets themselves, we are contacted on a regular basis to make widgets for people. We have worked with a wide variety of clients, large and small. In a way, everything we have done so far has been “viral” in the sense that is just spreads by itself. Sometimes I can’t even believe it myself.
The next obvious question…is the widget biz your full time gig…is it paying the bills and buying you toys?
That does seem to be the measure of success on the net.
It is not a full time gig, at least it isn’t yet. Two of the three of us are still full time students and the other 1/3 has a full time job. That said, we have some pretty cool stuff in the works. As far as paying the bills is concerned, WidgetNest has been profitable from day one. If you have more questions, feel free to email me. lemieuxster at the gmail