widgets Archive

A year ago this month AOL acquired Goowy which included the Goowy desktop and the YourMinis widget creation tools. Goowy was one of those companies (like Feedburner) that had great potential and I was a bit disappointed when they went under the AOL umbrella. Back in October AOL announced that the main YourMinis site was going to be discontinued but widgets would continue to work.

Update: In the comments, Gary Benitt from yourminis/AOL notes that they have removed the ads and are working on better ads and will also make an announcement when the ads begin again. Thanks Gary!

On our sister site HTMLCenter, we run a Yourminis widget which includes the latest posts from CN (you can see two examples below). When I did my cruise around the sites this morning something made me do a double-take. The Yourminis widget now has an ad inside the widget! But not only is it any ad, it’s a completely non-targeted ad. And on the first load, it was that ^%$&@$*@$ stomach ad. Unlike many of the major tech blogs, I absolutely refuse the run the stomach ads that seem to be everywhere. I spent hours making sure they never appear on any of my network of sites. I’d be ok with an ad in the widget as long as the ad was targeted and I could provide a banned companies list.

I was on a panel last summer in Washington where we discussed widgets and widget advertising. I believe widget advertising will still be huge this year. Why? Exactly for reasons like this. You find a widget you like and install it into a popular post. You don’t come back to check the widget each day and so you missed the fact that the company jammed an ad (or other content) into the widget without notifying you. This is going to be a hot topic this year especially if the economy continues to decline.

The example I used on the panel included the following: let’s say you install a widget for a new movie that’s coming out in theaters. What happens to that widget once the movie has left the theater? Does the movie company have the right to change the content of the widget without notifying the site owner? Once consumer brands realize that by getting a user to install a widget they own a piece of real estate for free "for life" brands will start creating widgets on an exponential scale. Why pay for just a simple ad unit when you can push out a widget at the same time?

Part of the issue with widgets is that unlike ad networks, there’s no real record of where the widgets are posted and who is the site contact. I strongly believe that widget creators have a responsibility to notify the site owners when content in the widget changes. Even if it means they need to go to every single site where the widget is installed and send a contact inquiry.

I am certainly disappointed in the method yourminis decided to go about jamming the crappiest possible ads into the widgets on HTMLCenter. The widgets will be removed tomorrow and I highly doubt I will use another widget from Yourminis/AOL in the near future. 

We initially covered Blist when they launched at DEMO a year ago and then they raised $6.5 million later in February 2008. Blist helps you share data online. The tool usage ranges from simple databases for to-do lists through corporate CRM projects.

Today Blist is announcing the launch of Blist Widgets. The widgets can be used to display data from a Blist file or they can also be used to capture data from users. It’s a good way to create a collaborative workspace for data. The idea is to replace the static HTML table with a more rich experience using a Blist widget. The widgets look like good competitors to the Google Docs widgets.

Interestingly, when I load the widget in IE7, it loads fine the first time. If I browse away from the window (minimize, change tabs, etc.) and then come back to the widget window, the widget disappears.

The Blist team also noted that new U.S. President Barack Obama is using the Blist widgets on the change.gov website. Xconomy has a good article about the Obama tie. Here’s an example Blist widget:

Form Submissions

NY-based KickApps has announced the launch of a new application platform named "App Studio" this morning. The App Studio concept takes web applications and content, bundles everything together and creates a simple piece of code that any KickApps publisher can integrate into their site. Third-party publishers can also push their applications to the KickApps publishers through the App Studio. The company is announcing that Meebo and Yahoo Maps are the first two partners to join the platform.

Web developers need to submit their applications to KickApps to be included in the App Studio. It appears the applications must be in Flash to be accepted. The App Studio uses a WYSIWYG interface which should make it easy for KickApps publishers to integrate applications from the App Studio into their websites.

It would be interesting to find out if KickApps is working on opening the App Studio to work on any website regardless if KickApps powers the site. Opening up the studio would provide more usage and could provide a good way to get more visibility into KickApps.

In September KickApps launched a pretty innovative and customizable video monetization service.

MTV and Clearspring have announced a new distribution partnership today that will allow MTV to have their widgets shared via the Clearspring network. Today’s snnouncement comes a week after Clearspring refreshed their launchpad widget service. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

MTV will provide show- and media-related content in widget form and fans of the content can grab a widget and place it on their blog or social network page. MTV will also look to monetize the widgets as well.

By creating the set of widgets, MTV hopes to get tons of free advertising by getting users to distribute their ads for them.

Widget sharing service Clearspring has announced the launch of their latest version of Launchpad today. The new Launchpad allows for more customization than before including colors nad layout. Clearspring is now also supporting a variety of additional languages within their sharing feature.

The sharing menus within the widgets also prioritize the destinations based on each user’s history with other Clearspring widget interactions. The company has also launched "liquid sizing" which allows the sharing menu to morph to the right size automatically based on the size of the widget. Clearspring serves ads in the widgets on their free version.

The company has also pointed to new tracking analysis from comScore which shows them at 254 million unique visitors worldwide in September while I assume they are pointing to Gigya at 161 million visitors. comScore also notes that they had "reached" 101 million U.S. consumers for September. "Reached" is a tough word to use — I’d very much prefer to see actual interactions. Widget views are easy, interactions are a whole other ballgame. Part of the bump in numbers comes from Clearspring’s acquisition of AddThis.

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.

comScore will release their latest Widget Metrix report later this morning. From the report, "A total of 615 million people, representing 65% of the worldwide internet users, viewed or engaged with a widget in June 2008." While this number seems high, I would have expected it to be even higher. Nearly every page has a widget on it across the Internet these days.

I’d wonder exactly what comScore defines as a widget. Must a widget need to be viewable by the user to be counted? Would script code used in analytics tracking be considered a widget? I still believe that widgets will replace most traditional online display banner advertising by the end of 2009. The benefits of widgetizing an ad far outweight the cost to implement.

Gigya leads the pack serving over 150 million widgets during the period. In the U.S., Gigya served over 55 million widgets, giving them a 29.2% market share. It’s interesting to look at the charts below and compare a widget distribution platform like Gigya with a widget provider like Slide. Gigya doesn’t produce their own widgets, they help widget creators with distribution, monetization and analytics. Slide creates and distributes their own widgets. It’s hard to do a direct comparison.

(comScore asked that we remove the top 10 charts) 

Good to see SplashCast on the list - haven’t heard much from them lately. Check out my thoughts on widget installation and ethics, 2008 widget predictions and all of our widget coverage.