yourminis

Start page provider YourMinis has announced that this will be the last week for the start page. They have suggested that YourMinis users transition to another start page including myAOL, iGoogle or MyYahoo. They will apparently focus on creating widgets going forward.

The gallery will remain with detail pages on each widget but they have decided to remove "browsing, favoriting, and statistics functionality" from the public gallery. This means that you can pickup a widget but that's about it.

YourMinis is a service of Goowy which was acquired by AOL back in February. I can only assume that eventually the widgets will be served via the AOL framework. The Goowy webtop has also been shutdown and users transferred to AOL Mail.

AOL has announced this morning that through their Platform-A online advertising brand, they will bring together buy.at and Goowy Media. buy.at is an affiliate network with partners including Blockbuster and Ticketmaster. Goowy Media provides a widget platform and also powers the yourminis Webtop. This new offering will take the buy.at network and Goowy's technology to create a new set of monetizable widgets that publishers can place on their Web sites and blogs.

The first company to use the new affiliate widget setup is Ticketmaster. The widget is named "EventEngine" and will allow for customization of specific events.

AOL acquired Goowy in February of 2008 and buy.at also in early 2008. I still believes that widgets will change the advertising landscape this year.

AOL is announcing today that they are acquiring webtop Goowy. The deal also includes widget maker yourminis. Financial terms were not disclosed. I didn't realize this but apparently AOL worked with Goowy to provide original widgets for myAOL.

I've said so many times already (ok one more coming) that widgets are 2008's hottest area and AOL obviously agrees. The news that yourminis widget technology will be built into AOL's Platform A ad network also makes sense. Last week at the panel I moderated, Heath Row from Double Click spoke about their Widget Ads product.

Alex Bard, CEO and co-founder of Goowy said, "The platform and services we've built are an obvious fit with AOL's ad-supported Web strategy, and we look forward to expanding our widget offerings across the AOL network." One of the first interviews I conducted on CN was with Bard. It's worth listening to as he provides input on the VC process and some of the learnings he found with starting Goowy.

If another company is looking to acquire a great webtop/widget provider, check out Schmedley - it's a great build.

Ben Metcalfe sent over a link last week to his latest project called Bubbletop. Bubbletop is a start page from France Telecom/Orange and is similar to Pageflakes, Netvibes, yourminis and Schmedley. My first reaction after using this for a while was, "oh another start page, eh?" But what I have come to learn is that each startpage has it's own flavor and will appeal to a different type of user.

Bubbletop uses a friends system to share the content you find/use on Bubbletop. This is what makes Bubbletop unique. You can "friend" people on Bubbletop and then click the share button and after selecting your friends, they will get a notification of new content from you. What this means is that your friends must be using Bubbletop as well. Pretty groovy and innovative.

Another feature I like about Bubbletop is the ability to bring in my own widgets from other providers. In fact, I could take a widget from yourminis and bring it into Bubbletop. Ben notes, "you can bring widgets from other providers into Bubbletop – no need to build them twice!"

The Bubbletop Foundry is opening soon and will allow developers to collaborate on extending Bubbletop and creating new and interesting content for the start page.

On the business side, Mike notes, "This is an overly-crowded space (and now Google is now promoting their iGoogle product hard as well). But Orange has nearly 90 million mobile customers to try to push to their new online products."

Else, Bubbletop is another start page. I think the social features make it more interesting than 80% of the other start pages out there, but to make this feature really work, my friends need to use the app as well. I would suggest that Ben take a look at Schmedley for some design inspiration as Bubbletop looks more like a developer designed it than a designer.

Come inside for a screenshot >

Thanks for another great week, I sure do appreciate all the emails and comments about our posts and the tips and post ideas! Keep 'em coming! Keep 'em and your ideas coming! Here are some updates from our sponsors who help keep the rabbits spinning the wheels here! Seems we have a bit of widget news today.

We've got news on Rootly, WingSix, AdaptiveBlue and yourminis. They are our awesome sponsors. Come inside and learn about their latest releases and updates.