The AOL Developer Network this morning posted a YouTube video of Alex Bard giving a 3–minute interview that nicely summarizes several viral widget principles.
Bard is a co-founder of Goowy Media, which, among other things, developed the yourminis start page. This past February Goowy was purchased by AOL. Under Bard, yourminis has developed into one of the largest widget platforms in the marketplace today.
In this video, made at the recent web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, Bard summarizes several widget bullet points, including “elegant” monetization and a definition of “viral.”
This is definitely must-see. If you have buffering problems watching it on this site, you can see it here, on YouTube’s site.
Clearspring’s Jodi McDermott today published an article on one of Clearspring’s metrics named Active Placements.
The metric measures the count of a widget’s placements that have been viewed at least once during a specified time period.
This metric, when combined with the number of times the widget is grabbed and the number of times the widget is installed, can show a widget’s “staying power.”
“As widgets are grabbed and placed on web sites, their staying power is where the impact of the widget really shines,” says McDermott.
You can read the entire article on Jodi’s Widget Analytics blog here.
Right now, Opera is the only browser that has its own built-in widget platform. Not only that, the platform is a breeze to work with.
Widget lovers should seriously consider ditching their current browsers (Firefox, IE, Safari, etc.) and take a look at the Opera browser.
You want to search for a widget? Just click the Widgets menu that is built right into Opera’s main toolbar!
The “Add widgets” menu opens to Opera’s impressive Widgets page (below) of more than 1,200 instantly available widgets.
You are officially in widget heaven.
When you find the widget you want, you only need to click the “Launch” button below the widget’s picture.
The widget opens instantly to your desktop.
Resize your new widget, move it around, configure it, play with it. It’s that simple!
Plus, in addition to this seamless widget platform, the Opera browser is generally considered to be the fastest browser on the market today. That has certainly been my experience.
Also, there are some major Opera widget features in the works. New widgets are currently being developed for: (See here for more details.)
• Mobile devices • TV and Set-Top Boxes • Consumer Electronics • Automotive & Transportation
Now, for some imortant caveats:
• You will not find every widget you want. You may have to search outside of Opera to get something special you are looking for.
• Almost all Opera widgets currently run only on the desktop. Only a select few of their widgets are currently embeddable into Web pages. Mobile widgets are in the works.
• When you close Opera, your widgets close also. (What I’ve been doing is minimizing Opera, and just using my widgets.)
P.S. The Opera widget platform includes development tools for creating custom widgets from scratch, i.e. not having to use widget templates, which is the case for some other “create your own widget” platforms. I’ll be creating some widgets in the coming days, and my next report on Opera widgets will about my widget-creating experiences and how Opera 9.5 beta 2, released just today, stacks up on the widget front. Stay tuned…
Who isn’t talking about going green this Earth Week? It’s a hail storm of green-themed content everywhere we turn: events, print inserts, special features, blogs, mags, lists and advertising messages…the sheer volume is downright un-greenlike in its excess. Mass(ive) marketing!
If you’re looking for a widget to save our earth, well, the technology hasn’t advanced that far yet, though we wholly support and would enjoy the opportunity to report such innovation.
But if you want to go beyond green to full color today, there are several widgets that provide a mental respite from all that serious concern over your “101 Ways I’m Going to Save the Earth” checklist.
To start, engage with the Colorburn widget from Firewheel Design. Find colorful inspiration, whether you go green or not.
Or use the Canvas2 widget on WidgetBox to doodle in your favorite spray brush colors. (Don’t feel any peer pressure today to stick to green; innovate and create with these low-emission colors.)
Finally, if what you really seek is to duck the Al Gore eco-agenda and challenges for a later day, then the Yahoo! Rose-colored Glasses widget might be your best bet. It might make you mellower the next time you’re faced with paying $4 a gallon at the gas pump or having no A/C on a spare-the-air day.
P.S. To keep my own carbon footprint from spreading, I’m off on the bus to the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. Nuggets to follow…
Widget security is a topic that seems to lurk in the background, not getting much attention. One example of this is the huge RSA Security Conference held last week in San Francisco. It did not have ANY panels on widget security.
A MacWorld article on widget security said,
“Widgets are owned by the user, and can do anything that a user can do. For instance, they can remove files from your home directory without asking permission. They can run anything from the command line that a user can. They can call any AppleScript that a user can.”
Yesterday, one of the W3C drafts on widgets stated that, “When compared to Web browsers, some market-leading widget user agents have a comparatively relaxed security model that allows an instantiated widget to read, write, modify, and/or delete files, automatically upload files, automatically download files, execute local applications, and even perform cross-domain request to “mash-up” data from multiple different sources. All without the end-user having any indication that their privacy and security might be at risk.” (Bold formatting is mine.)
So how does a typical user address this problem? Most of us look the other way and just click the “Install Widget” button. We are often told to only download software from sources that we trust. Well, who ARE you supposed to trust, and WHY?
I would very much like to hear your comments on and experiences with this issue. I’ll be writing more on this subject.
This morning Victor Harwood of Digital Hollywood released his video on YouTube of an all-star panel discussing “Widgets as a Platform,” part of the recent 2008 Media Summit in New York.
The video (below) is must-see viewing for anyone in the widget industry. Among the topics addressed by the panel are strategies for distributed content, thoughts on engagement, and whether widget marketing is a fad or not.
I like history. I also like etymology. The origin and early growth of things, anything, fascinate me.
So when I saw Niall Kennedy’s “widget timeline,“ I spent a good 15 minutes soaking it in. I can’t vouch for its accuracy, and it may not be completely up-to-date, but it’s a very rewarding overview of widget history.
Make sure you play with and read all of the pop-ups. There’s a lot of useful information there. Thanks, Niall!
WidgetWebExpo, to be held in New York this June 16 and 17, has announced an amazing lineup of more than 20 widget topics, each one addressing critical issues and questions in the widget marketing arena.
Here is a summary list. Make sure you go here to get detailed descriptions and ongoing updates.
Day 1
Keynote: OpenSocial: Transport of Delights?
Show us the money!
The value of open social networks for widgets
Media Transformative
What does a widget campaign look like from an agency perspective?
Widgets promoting widgets
Widget platforms
Widgets as an expression of application interfaces
Are widget standards an oxymoron?
Can widgets eat your Web site?: security issues
Day 2
Keynote: Startups with widgets, widgets as startups
eCommerce in widgets
Mobile widgets
Widgets as adverts: How do we go from here to there?
Towards a long term widget strategy
Tracking widgets in the wild
Exploring the Web and desktop widget dichotomy
Social Meaning In A Fragmented World: Can we come together in a Web that’s exploding?
How we built a widget that can really interact with the users
Ahh … April! Being a sports fan, I like to follow my Cleveland Indians. And no, that’s not an April Fool’s joke.
There was a time, several years ago, that I could launch a cool little widget from Yahoo! named Gamechannel, pick whatever baseball team I wanted and see live play-by-play info. I could even launch and watch multiple teams. Well, those days are sadly over.
There are several widgets today that feed you live score updates, but no play-by-play. There’s a cool baseball widget from Schmaps (Sports Schedule Maps) that lets you see stadiums, schedules, maps, etc. But there are absolutely no widgets today that offer play-by-play.
Yahoo! has morphed their great old Gamechannel widget into a full Gamechannel browser page. Very big. Very uncool.
Major League Baseball offers their Gamedaybig browser page, but no widgets, except for some phones– at a cost of $5.99 per month, or $19.99 for the season.
Major League Baseball is missing the widget boat, in a huge way. Can you imagine how many brand impressions they could get from good widgets? Can you imagine what a good MLB widget could do on Facebook, Netvibes, and others?
All is I have to say is WAKE UP MLB, and join the widget 21st century!
This morning Mike Jones, co-founder of the ad network Userplane.com, posted a concise list of key pointers to guide marketers before they launch a widget ad campaign:
James Welch, Head of Research for JustSearch, was on the SEO panel described below, and gave a very well received presentation entitled “Gadget Ads: How could they work for you?” James has kindly made his PowerPoint presentation available for download here. ——————————– Original Post:
Would you believe that marketing people are beginning to proselytize about the use of widgets?
The buzz word “API” hit the news this week when Yahoo! decided to adopt the OpenSocial API, while big player Facebook remained a holdout.
Most people in the social network industry have a basic understanding of what API (Application Programming Interface) means.
It’s the software interface that allows an application, like a widget, to work in any given environment, like the different environments used by MySpace, Bebo, Orkut, etc. The widget needs to know the environment’s rules– its API– in order to function.
Now I’ve always wanted to dig a little deeper into how APIs really work, and I recently found an excellent article that takes the reader to the next level of understanding APIs.
If you want to go to that level, and are not afraid of learning more acronyms, Ryan Deschamps’ article “APIs: Who? What? Why? How?” is a must read.
You won’t become an API programmer, but you’ll be able to use the term with a knowing nod.
By all accounts, FriendFeed is the aggregator du jour for getting ALL of your friends’ social feeds in one place. And all hot social sites offer their own widget, right?
Well, in one of the many FriendFeed discussions I was reading, I found someone asking about how good their widget was. So I went to look for it. Good luck trying to find it.
Seems that they had one and then removed it. After digging pretty deep, I finally found out that you can still get it, but you have to know the “secret” place. The treasure was revealed on the Blogoscoped blog: you get the embed code by using this URL: “http://friendfeed.com/embed?user=yourname” (replace “yourname” with your FriendFeed user name shortcut, like “john”).
There are very few people using the widget, but Paul Buchheit, co-founder of FriendFeed, is one of them. Turns out that Paul was the creator and lead developer of Gmail! You can see the widget on his blog, or my example of it here:
This is clearly a beta version of the widget.
The widget shows YOUR OWN social feeds, but NOT those of your friends. I suppose showing your feeds could be interesting to your blog readers, if they want to dig deeper into what YOU are doing.
I also discovered that FriendFeed has a Google group, with discussions of the widget and a few minor tips on how to customize the beta version.
If you are an early adopter of bleeding-edge stuff (and who among us isn’t?), you can be first on your block to actually show your friends the FriendFeed widget.
During my 24×7 surfing, I found a nice mention of our widgetBeat site on the German blog, “Exciting Commerce.”
Here is their complete comment:
“BTW: Neben Sexy Widget ist derzeit WidgetBeat das tonangebende Widget “Blog of the Moment.”
Loosely translated, it means, “BTW: Besides Sexy Widget, WidgetBeat is the pace-setting Widget ‘Blog of the Moment’.”
The positive attention is encouraging. We are flattered to be called “pace-setting,” but more importantly, we are dedicated to building “cred” in the widgetsphere and are working hard to earn every loyal reader we can. We do value all comments, so please join us with your input to our posts or contact us directly at info@widgetbeat.net.
And, as they say in Germany, “Danke vielmals!” to the Exciting Commerce blog.
Jodi McDermott, aka “widgetgirl,” is one of the leaders in the Web analytics and widget analytics world. She’s an active member of the Web Analytics Association and is co-chairing a WAA subcommittee for drafting analytic standards for Web 2.0, including widget analytics.
Yesterday she posted the insightful article “Engagement with a widget” that reveals some of her thinking on how widget use on the Internet can be measured.
McDermott references “grab rates,” “shared rates,” “active rate vs. ‘churning off’ rate” and many others. She also breaks widgets into categories and offers specific metrics for each category.
The need for standard widget metrics is obviously huge. Big brands starting to use widget advertising are increasingly in search of meaningful metrics.
But she wisely concludes that “none of these metrics in isolation are going to answer the question of ‘What is your customer’s level of engagement?’ The metrics are simply a set of tools provided to help the widget creator analyze their content that is specific to their business goals and objectives.”
The field of widget analytics is an important area to keep our eyes on, and McDermott’s views are a good portal into it.
by Al Merkrebs, February 29, 2008 @ 12:45 p.m. PST
Did you know that YouTube, according to the Alexa ratings, ranks #2 for ALL traffic on the Internet? Yahoo.com is #1. Both of those ratings surprised me. YouTube’s rating actually makes it the #1 social network.
So I searched YouTube for “widgets,” expecting to find maybe 10-15 video clips. The result: 1,690 videos. OK, I know that some of these are videos about dogs or guys named “widget,” but most of them were actually ABOUT WIDGETS. That’s pretty impressive.
Anyway, I found one that I think is quite good, named “What are Web widgets?” made by Robin Good. I’ve embedded it here for you to take a look at.
This video is the first in a series of five. The other four are also quite good. You can find all five just by searching YouTube for Web widgets, or use this link.
If nothing else, these kinds of clips show the power of video to teach. So play these clips above and let me know what you think.
First, you have to love the company’s name- Viewdle. They recently announced the beta release of a widget that pops up video from the text of a person’s name on a Web page.
It’s called the “Name Widget,” and it’s unusual because you have to scroll over text before you actually see the widget.
For example, scroll and keep your mouse over this name: Hillary Clinton,and you should see a brief, silent video of the person. Now try this name: Barack Obama. Or, if you prefer: John McCain.Very cool, right?
The company states that the widget “enables publishers of online publications, blogs and websites to add a visual representation of people referenced in their text.” The technology is based on their “multi-modal video search platform that uniquely combines indexing technology for text, audio and actual video.”
Pros: It’s fun and does what it says: “brings text to life;” works on standard HTML Web sites, Blogger and Typepad; very easy copy/paste installation.
Cons: It’s beta and not supported on Opera yet (make sure you have the latest version of Flash player!); does not yet work on the standard social Web sites, like Facebook and MySpace, but support for social sites is in the works; currently uses only a people search of Reuters’ content, but future releases will let you select other URLs.
Coolness factor: 4/5
Engine required: None. For now, just copy and paste code into your own independent Web site.
eMarketer.com today released a report entitled, “Web Widget and Applications: Destination Unknown, Are they a fad or are they the future of Internet marketing?”, by Debra Aho.
The report’s summary states “Widgets are popping up everywhere online. Since Facebook opened up to third-party applications in May 2007, nearly 15,000 applications have been developed. Overall, some 100,000 developers are working on widgets and applications worldwide.”
widgetBeat™ is dedicated to bringing you timely widget news and widget reviews, written by industry professionals. Think of us as THE place for all things widget. Your comments are most welcome.
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You want to search for a widget? Just click the Widgets menu that is built right into Opera’s main toolbar!
in your favorite spray brush colors. (Don’t feel any peer pressure today to stick to green; innovate and create with these low-emission colors.)
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