While there may be better choices in the future of lifestreaming with SocialThing! or a Profilactic offering into this space, or even now with what is being offered by MyBlogLog among others. What people are talking about the most is Friendfeed because it has the timing advantage, i has the notorious founder, the simplicity people like , because you can use it as a search engine to a degree and because it now also got a full API.
That as a whole could make Friendfeed the new twitter. as the service that even if it don`t has the best features, it remains as the synonymous of its niche.
So, what is missing from friendfeed right now?. a widget of course. oh wait, there is one!.
Now you can get it too simply by puting this in your browser:
The Widget is not officially available yet but, you can grab it, and try it out if you want and the only thing you need is your username in the embed friendfeed URL i have just shown you. once you have done it, you will get a widget just like this one:
And that would be pretty much it, the widget is not finished, you can expect more features coming to it, but it is pretty similar to the one by MyBlogLog. i would even dare to say they are kind at the same level, but given the API is now out, there is nothing stopping someone from making a way more sophisticated widget than this and since the widget is not finished, it also means that this widget features could change any minute now.
Remember when BlogCatalog made their own Lifestream Widget?. well as expected, MyBlogLog has responded with their own widgets, the results?. it does triumph over BlogCatalog Offering because they are offering TWO widgets for different purposes and Blogcatalog only offers one and it is not as complete as the one being offered by MyBlogLog.
This is of course not only because BlogCatalog debuted their Lifestream widget before MyBlogLog, it also responds to FriendFeed, SocialThing and to a degree to Profiliactic in a way that it gives MyBlogLog a little advantage and props to deliver better choices before those services start to offer their widgets in a official form
As it can be seen, the MyBlogLog Lifestream Widget shows your Lifestream and also offers your neighborhood or contacts Lifestream in it, something you can configurate if you only want to show your lifestream.
They also offer a full page version of the widget that can integrate into websites, or Blog special posts or About pages, a nice option for those wanting to unclude a lifestream into their Wordpress Blog that way.
The offerings are new and do need some polish but right now they are ahead of the curve of what the others are offering officially.
Lifestreaming aggregation solutions are the new “it” thing in 2008 right now, with the incredible push of hype and media attention Friendfeed and SocialThing! have. some even see Friendfeed as the new twitter. the thing everybody will like to talk about but only the social users will actually try.
But what about a solution that don´t has the hype and only does the job?, usually when something became popular a new almost generic solution appears as a script or as a small service. it is obvious that now, alternate solutions can be completely polished and have their own identity and feel. that is what LiveZUU proves and i will show you here.
LiveZUU service and focus on their own homepage is presented as a omnipresent widget in a minimalistic and full of sobriety environment. no distractions, just the facts.
As you can see, that is your homepage and your dashboard, the dashboard is a curtain you can either pull down or let go up so just your liveZUU widget remains.
You get to see the updates of your services in a very simple widget square that matches the design of the page, this is the default look.
The widget-homepage offers to views of your info:
1.-Your updates
2.-Your Services
But it is obvious that it would not make sense to just offer you a widget view of your lifestream, so the widget can offer you render pages, one for your friends using LiveZUU and one for your updates put in full display., as you can see your widget changes to view 2 and shows your services while you read render your lifestream or see the general lifestream from your friends.
You can also customize the look of your Widget-homepage with other designs or create your own and upload it to the general designs pool of LiveZUU
And finally, what we are here for, the main widget offerings from the service:
LiveZUU offers one JavaScript Widget in two versions, useful for Blog sidebars and applicable Social Networks. a Link badge if you want to promote your Lifestream.
And then there is the jewel of the punch. LiveZUU in a very intelligent move leveraged Netvibes UWA and offer a LiveZUU UWA Widget. so that means you can use it in netvibes, mac dashboard, the iphone, itouch, iGoogle, Opera, Windows Vista Sidebar, Windows Live Home and finally the Yahoo Widget Engine.
So, pretty much everywhere. the only version left for LiveZUU to do is a Flash or Silverlight version of their widget for it to be truly Universal.
There are many way to filter the noise in the feedosphere and way to get more interesting feedreading thanks to the help of feedreading companions like RSSmeme and Readburner (if you use Google Reader that is)
AideRSS leverages the data from the common meta cosmos into a what could be described as a RSS board tracked and ranked in a combination of authority and momentum from stand alone sources and also seen as a whole. some grades of separations from what technorati or techmeme do.
So AideRSS can be beneficial tool for your feedreading but also can be beneficial to your blog or blogs thanks to AideRSS Script widgets that you can see active in this blog post::
The first one will show you the best posts you have according to AideRSS feed analysis
The Second one will show you a summary of your blog posts as they are ranked by AideRSS so you can see how is your blog performing in a overall perspective and also offer feeds in terms of ranking
As this may still look a little unclear or odd to some, so Having this in mind i also had a little chat with Stephen Paul Weber, who is part of AideRSS team and i must disclose a personal friend of yours truly, so he could explain AideRSS a little further of what i already have:
Avatar:tell me what is the difference of AideRSS with other similar offerings?
Stephen Paul Weber:the big difference with AideRSS rankings is that they are relative to how well a particular blog does, and not to the whole blogosphere, so little guys don`t get lost in the noise of the top 100
Avatar:and how that differentiation is archived? part of your algorythm?
Stephen Paul Weber: The algorithm normalizes data against the average recent performance of the feed
Avatar:Recent performance being categorized as what? what is healthily performance of the feed so AideRSS can take it on and put it with the rest?
Stephen Paul Weber:so, each post is ranked by taking the recent social metrics (delicious, diggs, etc) and normalizing against the metrics reported on other recent posts on the same blog and from that we get a Postrank score between 1-10 for every post
Avatar:what do you think of rssmeme and readburner and how do they compare or not compare to Aiderss?
Stephen Paul Weber: Readburner is more about tracking stats than rankings, and they only really track one source (shared items)
Stephen Paul Weber:both are more about the best of everything — Aiderss is about the best *from one source*
Avatar:i see, and from that you filter a common feed or ranked feeds that can be added to other feed readers?
Avatar: (if they decided not to use the AideRSS site?)
Stephen Paul Weber:right
Avatar: ok, got it. thanks for the chat
Stephen Paul Weber: thanks was a pleasure!
*This chat was edited and originally conducted via IM*
There you have it AideRSS cannot only be a companion to your regular feedreading as it is RSSmeme or ReadBurner, it can also be a tool to empower your blog thanks to the widgets offered by AideRSS. i can see it as essential as having a Feedburner Feed. and you can have both, you can also pass your Blog feed via AideRSS and then pass it again over Feedburner for that matter.
The only thing i would want in the term of the widgets is if they could offer more options for them, like a Flash or Silverlight version and maybe even more options or more Widgets to fully utilize the AideRSS service.
If there is Any novelty i will keep you all posted.
I discovered toufee recently and i must say i am impressed by it. it is a Flex based online flash movie maker, it could be considered like a online Windows Movie Maker for Flash Video. simple to use and yet featured enough to do the work.
The Editor is completely Drag and Drop and easy to use, it kinda looks like a desktop WPF app, something i find pretty ironic, but it is a Flex based and you can do the same things you do in a Windows Movie Maker.
Worth to check out if you want to produce,edit and deploy your Embeddable Flash Video Player from Toufee, and you don´t need to worry it also counts with gigya Widlfire High Spread.
Mixwit, is the kind of thing i was waiting for, like for realz kiddos! . while i have seen all kind of Music Playing Widgets, there is something aesthetically pleasing and comforting to me about seeing a cassette rolling in progress while a song plays. something most under 20 will not understand at all right now, but for me it hits the right spot. and this is what Mixwit does, it allows you find music you like, do a playlist and place into a incredible cool Widget full of neo-retro nostalgia goodness. all thanks to the concept of Digital Objects. and i love Digital Objects.
Something we will get to see more and more as widget progress this year, i can assure you that.
And it is also in the cutting edge, Miwit counts with a Drag and Drop Flex Powered editor where you can pretty much have your own Mixwit Mixtape widget done in less than 5 minutes. and it will look just like the one you see here or even better because you can customize the colors, look and the label in the cassete adding your own customized cassette labels as backgorunds.
I must say that this is my favorite music playlist widget ever so far, so you really should try it out. and don´t worry about it not belonging in your blog or social network, Mixwit Mixtape widgets count with Gigya Wildfire High Spread, so you can counts with plenty of direct install options and a very good generic,embeddable flash code.
You don´t need to go anywhere to try out the widget, you can try the one in this post because fortunately there is no Auto Play option, so no worries.
I do have one idea i would love to see for Mixwit users, a virtual cassette rack. but other than that, this widget comes with my highest compliments.
By this stage in 2008, it must be pretty obvious that live video broadcasting and live video storage to web is one of the big trends of the year following the appearance of it in 2007 as lifecasting. so everyone needs broadcasting channel for those videos or a way to store and broadcast the videos of later use.
One of the way to do it in a more conventional or simple way without getting too into lifecasting or hardcore live videoblogging is the FlixWagon Flixee Widget. you can think of it as a portable Live Video and stored video channel, like being able to embed your YouTube page and Ustream page into a widget so you can put it in your profile or blog.
The best of it is that you will be able to show your videos to your Blog reader and if a live transmision occurs they will be able to check it out too. that is not only convenient but exactly what you want to happen since it saves you all the work of doing it manually.
The widget cab be seen here live so you can check it out.
Just like the announced Samsung F480 and F490 high end phones, Samsung will be introducing their new TouchWIZ UI OS into the AnyCAll, the other novelty in that phone is that it a Haptic phone with 22 vibrations/effects to simulate physical touch and physical touch interaction.
As you can see in this photo, the phone is noticeable larger and slimmer compared with the F480 and f490 and you can see it sporting the TouchWIZ UI with the Vista Sidebar Like Widget Desktop.
The phone can not only be considered a High End Phone but also being in the current Edge of technology because it also got a TV receiver and more importantly because it is a 700-800 US dlls phone exclusive to Korea.
While it is not strange for some web companies to be blocked in less liberal countries, it were services like YouTube or MySpace the usual suspect of getting blocked in such countries because they distribute either media or action that go against the perspective of the government of such nations. this is the first time that a widget related company had been banned.
This news was shared in the Slide Blog as a notice to Turkish Users:
“If you use Slide in Turkey, you’ve probably noticed that you are no longer able to access the Slide website or our applications (you may not even be able to access this post). The Turkish government has accused Slide of “harboring pictures and articles that are considered to be insulting to Ataturk,” founder of the republic.”
I obviously find this foolish, i can only imagine that if a Widget Company can get banned the only weirder thing to be banned could be either twitter or Friendfeed while we are at it.
But i wonder if we are going to see more Widget related Censorship after this? and from what country.
The competition in Widgets is hard, but the competition in Music related Widgets is even harder. so any new branch counts, and that is something last.fm knows very well, so they have announced they will be doing some specific versions of their widgets for Netlog.
Netlog while not very known in the USA, it is actually well known in the rest of North America (Canada and Mexico), Latin America and part of Europe. it even is one of the top 10 social networks in the world (number 10 i think ) so it is actually a relevant social network and it having their own small platform independent to the rest (facebook friendly or OpenSocial)
The last.fm widgets to be ported for netlog profiles will include the last.fm radio, charts and playlist.
Not that long ago, Derek posted about SplashCast incursion to the MySpace Apps Platform and to that effect, news of SplashCast raising 4 million dlls more do make a lot of sense. they are going to be quite busy and into the MySpace platform and they should since they seem like the perfect fit for managing media content for brands and artists into custom rich media channels. which is of course what SplashCast pretty much does.
Splashcast is the kind of company needed in the new age where page views are being replaced with user engagement metrics, brand awareness and focused content delivery.
I truly never expected them to take this direction when they started but i bet the lure of Embedded Media marketing was too strong to ignore. this is of course the other side of Widget Advertising and the other kind of widget advertising, one that mixes the content management with marketing and of course the promotion of product, persona via well executed branding.
Something quite boring for most. but since i have a background in Advertising too. i do find it quite interesting. what i would like to know is where SpashCast is headed, the competition in this segment will get stiffer and harder. so while they could be considered neutral in this space compared to ad agents, branding managers and of course widget advertising it is possible that the future of splashcast get turned into that or they turn back to regular consumers with another offering from them.
That is what remains to be seen, but for now, SplashCast is in a good state, so everyone interested in delivering media content should be put on notice.
Given DoubleClick got acquired by google I would have thought that they would power the sharing abilities of DoubleClick Widget Ads offerings, but that is not the case. so it means that the Google Gadget platform is not a developed as we thought after all to ingrate quickly with DoubleClick right away. so someone had to fill that gap. and that someone is Gigya Wildfire.
This news just comes hot on the heels of Gigya raising a almost historic 9.5 million dollars round for their 2 month old Widget Ads network. and this deal alone could mean more money than that money funding. so i guess there must be some very happy investors right now.
Because while it is true this deal is very temporary given the imminent integration of DoubleClick into Google, this deal should prove for quite a profitable deal.
Why is this important?. consolidation of the Widget Ads networks that in turn consolidate Widgets even more into the mainstream.
Feedreaders are now the way most power users can make sense of the information stream they get to consume everyday, for other that is not enough. they even need ways to sort their feedreading with supplemental services like Readburner (when using Google Reader) or RSSmeme so they can be used as a companion to sort the relevant stories around.
With that in mind RSSmeme is now offering a widget button for those using their service and even those who are not using it but want to leave that option to visitors open.
It consist of a Share Indicator widget button that you can place into a blog and that will be placed along your posts, not in the sidebar so you can get that indicator to light up whenever you post is being shared in RSSmeme. there is also a Feedburner Flare widget button.
pretty simple it is like any other feedburner feedflare indicator or like technorati blog reactions widget button..
Stumble this!
was a pleasure!
