instead of the much anticipated video-upgrade, we just have received a very cool Last.fm flash-widget, which is embedding personalized radio-streams (”recently played”…), playlists & charts to any given website. check the sidebar of this page, press the “play”-button & start grooving (click here if you’re reading this post in your RSS-reader!) …stunning!
(more on TechCrunch)
Tariq Krim from Netvibes just announced the release of an open source javascript runtime (Universal Widget API, UWA) including the Netvibes UI-library. no details on their blog yet, but this should kick off an avalanche of additional Netvibes-module, further strengthening Netvibes’ lead in the market (click for an Alexa traffic-comparison of Netvibes, Pageflakes etc.). TechCrunch has far more details than Tariq just disclosed in his 5minute presentation…basically the API should ensure that widgets work cross-platform, including Vista, Mac OS Dashboard and Google for now, with support of Yahoo! Widgets following later. besides, Krim announced the upcoming support of OpenID, which probably makes open, decentralized authentication the hottest topic of this years fowa.
yesterday definitely was “widget-day”, as WidgetsLive, the first conference solely centerend on web-widgets took place in san francisco. of all the talks & product-announcements (read Liz Gannes’ extensive coverage at GigaOM), Fox Interactive’s launch of their widget-platform SpringWidgets (beta) was probably the hottest topic of the day.
while I tend to find most widget-engines quite generic and similar in featuresets, SpringWidgets is unique in several ways: while competing platforms run their widgets either on the local desktop (f.e. Yahoo! Widgets, ex Konfabulator) or exclusively on the web (f.e. Google Gadgets), SpringWidgets’ code can be executed in both environments. widgets like the RSS-reader on the sidebar of this page, can be easily pulled to the desktop by just clicking the green cog (top-left). the desktop-software SpringBox is currently available for Windows only, with a Mac OS-version to follow soon. SpringWidgets integration with several social networking-sites is even better: widgets can be sent to profile pages on myspace, friendster, hi5 and xanga with a single click. as usual, html-snippets are used to get SpringWidgets on any other webpage (see screenshot below).
unlike most competitors which are using some sort of xml/html/javascript, SpringWidgets is based on flash-technology. while this hopefully will bring us multimedia widgets incorporating streaming audio & video, it might turn out problematic since it forces developers to use Adobe’s expensive Flash development-kit. however, this potential handicap in SpringWidgets’ adoption will probably be easily compensated by Fox’ ability to push the platform towards billions of myspace-users.
update: TechCrunch points out that Microsoft’s widget-platform included in Vista will also run locally and on live.com sites.
as of yesterday, more than 1.200 Google Gadgets formerly restricted to Google Desktop are now free for use on any website you want. the widget-collection includes modules for streaming-video, inline-chat, flickr- or iTunes-integration as well as loads of - more-or-less useless - eyecandy.
more interesting: Google launched an unbranded search-frontend at searchmash.com earlier this week. looks like searchmash is going to be a test-bed for search user-interfaces. currently searchmash integrates image-results with common results and allows ‘infinite’ scrolling through results (while Microsoft Live does this by automatically loading further results when the user scrolls to the bottom of the page, searchmash requires the user still to click the link “more web pages”, which kind of renders the feature useless for me).
recently released Grazr 1.0 is a powerful web-widget displaying RSS-feeds and OPML outlines of any source. OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) is an XML-based outline-format, usually consisting of linked lists of RSS-feeds. integrating Grazr into your website is fairly easy and requires nothing more than the source-URL of the feed/outline you want to browse. the widget is fully customizable in terms of width & height. moreover Grazr offers plenty of pre-sets for various page-layouts and blogging-tools.
the example below shows Grazr’s visualization of the community podcast directory.
it has been around the blogosphere all day, and if you are reading this blog using a web-browser, you already might have recognized it on the sidebar: as of today, meebo - the web-based meta-IM-client reviewed few weeks ago - offers a flash-based IM-widget for inclusion in any website.
so how does it work? after adding a single line of html to your frontpage, visitors of your site can instant-message you without the need of being connected to a particular IM-network. siteowners can watch visitors enter their site, allowing them to contact users directly (’wuuh! welcome to my blog!’). the downside: this works only as long you - the siteowner - are logged into your meebo-account (though this might change since meebo is based on the open Jabber-protocol).
meeboMe is a nice way for maintainers of low-traffic-sites to get in direct contact with visitors - as one of those, I’ll keep this widget online for a few days, so feel free to contact me! what I’ld like even more: a widget allowing direct communication between concurrent visitors, similar to chatsum, but without the need for a browser-extension.
