Widgetbox Archive

Over the last couple of years I’ve written about my view that widget advertising will be huge. Sadly it seems to be taking longer than I expected to see widgets dominate advertising slots across the Web.

Today Widgetbox and Linkshare have announced a partnership that could help get widget advertising moving in a forward direction. The partnership will create “ad widgets” which will contain affiliate-based products. The ad widgets will feature Linkshare’s network of companies and will be served via widget technology provided by Widgetbox. Linkshare members can create the widgets and share them across the Web potentially providing more income than a traditional affiliate advertisement.

From the announcement, “The LinkShare widgets display targeted products from single or multiple advertisers, giving publishers the hottest and most valuable products in a single widget. The widgets are dynamically updated and feature the freshest, most popular products. Other custom features include: multiple tabs of product content, multiple product display modes, custom sizing and custom styles. The widgets are easily embedded onto websites, blogs, and social media sites – including Facebook.”

Read more about my thoughts on widget timing, communications and ethics.

Fifteen days have passed since Widgetbox launched their App Accelerator which allows you to make easy Facebook applications. The stats the company sent over show over 700 applications created, many with over 1,000 installs. So far the top apps are: Perez Hilton, a Baby Ticker and a Magic 8 Ball. The team is also working on a monetization strategy.

Mike from Techcrunch noted the following recently, "Platform competition is great for developers, but it also means they need to create and maintain separate code for each platform they choose to play on. Someone is hopefully working on a startup that will streamline that process for people. Whoever does it first, and best, can have a winner on their hands."

Could Widgetbox be the company that helps streamline the cross-platform process? While it probably wouldn’t work for deep apps, for simple apps it might be able to do the job. Enter the app info in the App Accelerator and it provides app code for all of the platforms.  This raises a point I bring up a lot which is becoming dependent on another’s technology – in this case, not only are you depending on the app provider (i.e. Facebook) but also on the translation software provider (Widgetbox). Jason has a discussion about trusting your business to Facebook.

Lastly it appears that Facebook wants to take out LinkedIn. Check out my platform-mania post from last week for more discussion on the various live and upcoming platforms.