We have to admit we haven't given much thought to blogging community site MyBlogLog over the last year or so. The service launched as a way for bloggers to get in touch with one another and find new sites they might be interested in. But Technorati and Google Blog Search are both much more useful for finding blogs covering topics you care about.
But that doesn't mean there's no value in MyBlogLog. The service offers a couple of web site tools including a free and subscription analytics package and a "recent visitors widget," that shows the profiles of other MyBlogLog members who have visited your page. And this week MyBlogLog rolled out an updated and much improved version of that widget.
Not only does the new widget have a slick Web 2.0 look and feel, but when you hover your mouse over the name or image of a recent visitor, you see link to their MyBlogLog profile and links to their web sites. This adds value for anyone who publishes the widget on their site, and also creates an incentive for bloggers and web publishers to sign up for a MyBlogLog account since there's a better chance that someone might see their profile on a random page and click through to their site.
To get the widget, just login to your MyBlogLog account and click the "Get Widgets" button to get the HTML embed code.
Ever wish there was an easy way to let visitors to your web site chat with you without giving out your IM contact info? Plugoo lets you embed a chat widget on any web page. You can customize the look and feel of the widget, change its size, and decide whether visitors need to enter their name to send you a message.
But here's the coolest part: When someone sends you a message using Plugoo, it will be forwarded to you regular IM account. You can forward messages to AOL IM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messnger, Google Talk, Jabber, or ICQ. And you don't even have to give Plugoo your login information for your chat client, since all the service does is forward messages.
Once you add the widget to your site, you can continue to customize it by logging into your Plugoo account. Any changes you make in your account settings will be reflected on your blog or web page.
You can also chat with other Plugoo members by visiting the Planet Plugoo member of the company's web site. But honestly, the embeddable widget is really where Plugoo shines.
If your blog client of choice is Google's Blogger, odds are you've banged your head against a wall at least a few times wondering why Blogger can't be a bit more like WordPress or TypePad. While Blogger is incredibly easy to use, it's a bit more difficult to customize. But with a bit of work, you can tweak your Blogger site to near-perfection.
For example, while Google doesn't offer a "recent comments" widget, Blogger buster has created a simple widget generator that lets you build and add a recent comments section to your sidebar. You can customize how comments appear by choosing how many comments to display, whether to show the date or post titles, and how many characters to include in the preview.
Freeware dashboard widget App Update checks Version Tracker to make sure your Mac's third-party software is up-to-date. After App Update checks your system, it provides links to the respective Version Tracker pages so you can download and install the updates.
You can configure the widget to automatically check daily or weekly, and it supports Growl so that you can be notified when updates are available. You can also add Apple Downloads and Mac Update as update sources to potentially find updates for more of your installed software. If you don't install all of your apps into your /Applications folder, simply add your desired paths into the "Path Settings" area of the widget's config section.
Since Mac users can't benefit from a system-wide package manager like that of Ubuntu, using this simple dashboard widget can keep your software updated.
The latest version of Yahoo!'s own mobile platform, Yahoo! Go 3.0 beta, is headed for prime-time tomorrow.
The biggest news in this release is the inclusion of the Mobile Widget Platform, which allows access to third-party widgets on the Yahoo! Go and Yahoo! Mobile pages. Widget makers include such big boys as eBay, MySpace and MTV--and with the release of the SDK to developers in the next few weeks, expect to see an explosion of third-party widgets.
Yahoo! Go will also feature an updated UI, optimized for--you guessed it--the mobile device. The home page is heavily customizable and includes new email at a glance, upcoming appointments on your calendar, weather, news, etc...
Of course this type of feature-rich release is not going to work on that old phone you have sliding around in your glove box. Upon its release, the Yahoo! Go 3.0 beta will be available only on high end mobile browsers such as the Apple iPhone, several Nokia Series 60 devices, including the N95, and select Windows Mobile devices (though it will be available for more devices "soon").
It's really easy to add an RSS feed to your start page or desktop, but we were looking for an easy way to let people add an RSS feed from their favorite sites to their own home pages or social profiles. We came across a really great tool: WidgetBox. Instead of coding our own Flash RSS widget that we could give our visitors to embed on their home pages, we found a ton of cool options for widgetizing lots of existing content.
What's even better, WidgetBox lets you turn any widget-sized HTML web page into an embeddable widget that can be shared with users in a friendly manner. Sadly, these widgets still aren't MySpace-friendly. But the WidgetBox does offer an intriguing wizard for creating Facebook apps out of your widgets.
WidgetBox also offers a very simple but flexible "blidget", an RSS-reading widget with options for size, colors, and presentation. Just type in the URL of your blog and WidgetBox produces a blidget. Check out the one we made for Download Squad.
Netvibes has been working on a way to give widget makers the ability to run their widgets on any widget platform, whether it's Vista, Mac Dashboard, Opera, iGoogle, or Windows Live. Now the fruit of their labor, the Universal Widget API, is in the wild, and it promises to increase exposure for widgeteers whose artful output was previously stunted because "it's not available for <x-widget-platform>".
Today, there are only about a thousand UWA-based widgets, but the number grows daily. Netvibes promises support for Yahoo Widgets in a forthcoming release, too. It makes us wonder if there's really such a thing as a killer widget, one that plays into the strengths of a particular desktop platform. Since most web widgets are RSS-based and limited in platform-specific functionality, we suspect most UWA widgets will be simplistic. So many widgets will likely still be limited to a particular platform, since they often have to talk to platform or app-specific applications in order to do their jobs, like, say an XBox remote control widget.
It's now safe to say, we've found a noble use for Dashboard: figuring out when the surf's up. WindGuru is a widget that offers one-glance reports on wind direction and speed--useful for figuring out when the waves are big and when they're just knee-high. This is particularly true in places where surfing is a twice-a-year luxury like on Lake Erie. Sadly, Lake Erie hasn't hit WindGuru's list of "spots" yet.
Designed by a surfer, WindGuru also offers a five-day wind forecast. Not enough? Try iViewSurf, another widget that lets you check out the live webcams of some surfable beaches (albeit mostly located in France). Oh, and if you can't do Mac widgets, check out Windguru.cz, where you can track the hot spots in your browser instead.
When AOL introduced 5 GB of online storage--for free--there was much rejoicing. The service is called XDrive. But that wasn't the extent of it. For a reasonable premium (that's ten bucks a month), you could get 50 GB of online storage. Not a bad way to keep a few backups handy. AOL also jumped in the sack with JSON ("jay-son"), a web API that allows developers to work the XDrive into their own apps.
One such app is the Open XDrive Usage Meter Widget for the Mac's built-in widget system, Dashboard. The widget includes analog and digital readouts of available storage (in megabytes) and offers configurable thresholds for low space warnings. The background of the widget will change to yellow and then red as you surpass those thresholds. And, as the author of the widget points out--it's already compatible with Leopard, the next release of Mac OS X.
It's hard to escape online ads, and now Google has rolled out another ad format in order to take control of another piece of the ad pie and make it more dynamic and interesting. Ads in Google's Gadgets.
The AdWords Gadget program has been built to quite simply turn widgets into ads. These websites within websites can draw in dynamic content including data feeds, maps, images, audio, Flash, HTML and JavaScript content to serve an audience in over 100 countries with no hosting charges attached. The ads can then be embedded and users of your brand can share them amongst friends. Built on the iGoogle platform, companies like AOL and IBM are already using them to drive traffic.
With widgets and gadgets being so easy to embed into social networks and websites, there is surely no stopping Google from deploying these into such high profile locations as MySpace and Facebook.
With the popularity and continued growth in the world of widgets, Niall Kennedy has launched a successor to last year's popular Widgets Live! conference, Widget Summit 2007.
The Widget Summit will be held in San Francisco October 15-16th. This year, coined The Year of the Widget by Newsweek, will see this two day conference covering both the product and the development sides of the widget. Widget Summit 2007 sessions will also go over the different widget platforms used, new products and monetization options.
Tickets to the event are $500. They sold out very quickly last year, so if you're thinking about going, chalk up the coin now.
Get ready for the newest widget platform on the market, Joost. They have just rolled out their API and opened things up for developers to make masterpieces that integrate with the P2P TV client application.
The launch of Joost's latest version 0.12.0 is a little overshadowed by the API introduction, which is the icing on Joost's cake. The somewhat hush hush announcement in the product forums of their website will open up the application to a whole new realm of developers who will go beyond what Joost has already done with their current RSS, chat, and clock widgets.
The official Joost API website is currently password protected.
If you're creating websites, you'll probably know about Google Analytics, the once-expensive now-free web statistics service from the big G. Whilst you could, of course, log in to Google Analytics via the Analytics (recently-upgraded) website, it might seem like overkill to go to the hassle of logging in just to check visitor numbers.
Thankfully, Mac users can rejoice because Dashalytics allows you check visitor numbers, referrer sources and a fair amount more all from your Dashboard. Version 3 of Dashalytics came out just last week (with 3.0.1 being released today), so if you're wanting a hassle-free way to see just who's sending you all that traffic, this might be the very ticket.
Life without feeds would be one of sifting through thousands of endless stories and visiting website after website for content. Thanks to RSS, our lives have been ever so simplified.
OPML has been the typical approach to combining all RSS feeds into a single file that can be exported and imported into any feed reader. Then along comes RSS Mixer. This online tool lets users combine all favorite feeds into one. The drawback to using this is that you cannot simply upload an OPML file, you have to add multiple feeds. But if you have a few feeds that you wanted to follow no matter where you are, like via a mobile device like an iPhone or a widget embedded in your iGoogle homepage, this is a cool way to go. Users start off by giving a title to their 'Mix', then adding feed URL's into the Mix. When RSS Mixer is complete, users get the option to link to the mix, create an Apple Dashboard widget, create a Web Widget, get an RSS feed for the combined feeds, and launch an iPhone version of the mix.
It's a pretty impressive way to easily mix up RSS feeds, and stay on top of them no matter where you are. Our only wish, give us the chance to upload an OPML file.
Intel is getting ready to debut a closed beta this month of their new mashup tool accessible to non programmers.
The new MashMaker was spotted at the SIGMOD conference in June in a presentation that was prepared by Intel and Yahoo Research. The gist of it was the creation of a tool that made it easy to create mashups from many different sources.
Intel's MashMaker will be a web based tool that makes it easy for normal web users to create mashups from live online data. It will be able to query and combine data that uses an interface that has been inspired by both spreadsheets and web browser. The spreadsheet side will allow for the mixing up of data and editing, while the browser side will allow for navigation to interested content, bookmarking it, and molding it into new widgets.
Just picture simply pulling in information from Google Maps, with Facebook, ebay, Digg and Twitter and creating a complex, yet easy to develop mashup, this is what MashMaker could be like. If it is as easy as Intel and Yahoo made it sound, this has the potential to be a killer application that a lot of people are going to be using to create some crazy mashups.
We have to admit we haven't given much thought to blogging community site MyBlogLog over the last year or so. The service launched as a way for bloggers to get in touch with one another and find new sites they might be interested in. But Technorati and Google Blog Search are both much more useful for finding blogs covering topics you care about.
