58 posts filed under this category.
Content developed exclusively for the iPhone helped web publishers rethink content display beyond the desktop browser. Reimagining web content for small screens with bandwidth, latency, and interaction constraints provided publishers with an introduction to widget concepts and a broader web strategy. iPhone OS 2.0 ignited new mobile development in 2008, which should carry over to new platforms in 2009.
Today’s publishers need to think beyond the fixed location of their website and fully integrate with the large hubs of user activity on the desktop, mobile phone, social networks, blogs, and web pages at large. Syndication and widgets power new opportunities to carry content beyond the walls of a single site and into some of the largest brands in the world yet some publishers still haven’t gotten the message. I recorded a 1-hour video presentation earlier this week to better explain the syndication and widget landscape to web publishers.
On Tuesday Yahoo! launched its Open Strategy, exposing Yahoo! account data and social connections to third-party developers. Yahoo! Open Strategy is the third pillar of faith announced by CEO Jerry Yang last year during the company’s rebirth. Y!OS is the new glue connecting the next versions of Yahoo!’s own properties and will eventually power more relevant advertising across the network. In this post I will provide an overview of the new Yahoo! services and its impact on both Yahoo! and third-party developers. Yahoo! Open Strategy is one of the keynote presentations at Widget Summit next week.
The Internet is coming to your TV, reclaiming your split attention span from the other gadgets around the house. Intel announced its latest effort to power your living room yesterday with new media processors, reference designs, and software stacks that may eventually find their way into the cable boxes, Blu-ray players, and home media centers of 2010. Intel partnered with Yahoo! to deliver Internet-connected widgets, advertising, and content to potential partners with a software stack branded The Widget Channel. What new opportunities are available inside the Widget Channel platform? When is the right time to implement?
I am hosting a my third annual Widget Summit conference November 3rd and 4th at Hotel Nikko in San Francisco.
Microsoft’s Windows Vista operating system includes support for widgets on every desktop. Windows widgets are permanently docked in a sidebar, providing up-to-date information and easy access to small tasks throughout the day. In this article I will walk you through the major components of a Windows Vista Sidebar gadget including major differentiating features, best practices, and tips for widget packaging and distribution.
The total number of widget platforms and deployment options intimidate many newcomers. Each platform offers a unique audience and features, but widget basics remain the same across Windows Vista, Nokia S60, Google, MySpace. and more. In this post I will outline the basic components of a widget including static assets, user preferences, processing remote data, and rendering your final widget.
Microsoft opened a new online marketplace last night to sell a new class of desktop and web applications directly to consumers. The new version of Windows Live Gallery extends the existing Windows Live Gold partnership program with premium content listings, partner storefronts, and the ability to charge Microsoft’s users for each new widgets.
Google Desktop widgets can now be embedded in your iGoogle personal start page. This new functionality adds OS-level functionality such as CPU utilization, currently playing tracks in iTunes, or a battery indicator inside a Web interface. Google Desktop 5.5 is now available in a widget-only version to bridge these two worlds.
The Widget Summit schedule is now complete, and I am pretty happy with the results. My goal for the conference is to provide two days of intensive education about the current state of the widget industry and share best practices with the many new publishers entering the space. This year’s conference spans two days, October 15-16, covering both the business and implementation of widgets. I will share some of my speaker notes before the conference, but first let’s take a look at some of the overarching themes of Widget Summit.
Widget terminology often confuses newcomers. The variance of terms — widget, gadget, module, badge, button, etc. — can create impressions of a fragmented industry in its early days, not able to agree on anything as simple as a name. In this post I will walk you through the etymology and nomenclature of widgets and its variances. I interpret each term as a separate meaning, not a synonym, depending on the structure and use of widget content.
The widget technology we take for granted today has been over 25 years in the making. Small pieces of customized desktop and web content have made their way into our lives whether you call it an accessory, a widget, a web part, or a gadget. This post highlights some key moments in widget platform history that have shaped where we are today.
Google introduced a new advertising unit tonight: Google Gadgets. This new form of rich content is available everywhere AdWords image ads are currently served, and includes a completely new widget analytics system.
I am hosting a two-day widget conference October 15-16 in San Francisco. Widget Summit is the sequel to last year’s Widgets Live! conference, bringing together developers and product planners for a two-day perspective on the widget industry.
Yesterday Adobe announced support for H.264 and AAC decoding in the next version of its popular Flash Player plugin. The announcement will change the face of online video playback and production based on international standards. In this post I take a look at the major changes in Flash Player 9 “Moviestar” and how it may affect multimedia publishing on the Web.
Apple is syndicating iTunes purchase history and user reviews as Flash widgets and Atom feeds under a new program called My iTunes Widgets. Any iTunes Music Store customer can opt-in to sharing their subscribed podcasts, purchased music, music video, TV shows, movies, and positive reviews through an account preference set in the iTunes application.
In this post I’ll outline different ways you can take advantage of Google’s architecture to serve your widget content to the world. I’ll cover various depths of integration and their branding and licensing issues.
In this post I’ll provide tips and tricks for widget developers interested in serving fast, reliable widget content to as many people as possible. I’ll highlight some of the best practices for serving web content and their specific application towards widget development.
In my last post I wrote about web widget formats: the ways we render widget content within another web site. Web widgets are dynamic, living, breathing pieces of content and often need new data from external services to stay fresh and topical. In this post I’ll summarize popular methods of updating a widget’s dynamic data using remote HTML framing, plain-text, JSON, XML, and web feeds. I will detail use cases of each format, provide example data to illustrate the data, and document the appropriate request and parsing libraries in major web widget platforms.
Web widgets vary by platform and provider but generally come in four basic flavors: JavaScript, embedded object, blog plugin, and frames. Anyone publishing widget content online should know a few basic concepts shaping their decision and choose the right mix of software and content based on their target. In this post I’ll walk through some of the basic advantages, disadvantages, and considerations for each type of widget content and bring you up-to-speed on a few current widget deployment options.
Google is directly investing in small companies to expand the popularity of its iGoogle product. Google Gadget Ventures grants popular Google gadgets $5,000 for further development. Popular widget businesses are eligible for $100,000 in seed capital with Google taking an equity stake in each company. Google expects to invest $700,000 or more in third-party widget development over the next year. About 9% of Google’s gadget directory would be eligible for the grant consideration based on the Google Gadget pageview analysis I last conducted in April. How it works A gadget must have at least 250,000 gadget views per week to…
Steve Jobs announced the iPhone development platform at last week’s Worldwide Developer Conference to sighs of disappointments. Mac developers were anxious to develop new applications for the the most anticipated consumer electronics device in years, only to be told they should code fancy websites instead. The 9-minute iPhone development demonstration during the WWDC keynote was a bit confusing for anyone new to Apple widget development. In this post I’ll break down a few Apple widget components, transport you to the iPhone development world, and explain a few restrictions and lock-downs common in the mobile phone industry. Dashboard under the…
Microsoft will offer three tiers of partner support for Windows Live Gallery according to a podcast with Chris Butler this week posted on LiveSide. Companies and brands may partner with Microsoft to highlight their Windows Live Gadget offerings for preferred inclusion in the Live.com personal homepage, Windows Live Spaces sidebar, and the Windows Vista sidebar. Windows Live Gallery partners receive visual differentiation in the customization listings and programmatic access to the Gallery serves to add and update new Microsoft gadget content. Microsoft plans to offer external developers three tiers of support: Gold partner A premium offering associated with an…
Webmasters will soon be able to auction off widget space on their sites and blogs managed and marketed by advertising powerhouse Google. Advertisers will produce a Google Gadget in standard IAB unit sizes for distribution across the Google network at CPC or CPM billing rates. Google will bolster its current Google Analytics package to support better tracking paid and free widget campaigns in this sub-page and asynchronous pageload environment. The Google Gadget advertising beta program was publicly announced during a marketing summit for the automotive industry according to Online Media Daily. By the end of 2007 Google will offer its…
Widgets are coming to Series 60 handsets this Fall, bringing tiny pieces of content onto the application menu of the world’s best-selling smartphone OS. The S60 Web Run-Time builds upon the existing open source technologies in the S60 browser and provides a development experience very close to Apple’s Dashboard widget environment. The widget software will be available in version 3.2 of Nokia’s operating system due out this Fall. The Series 60 operating system is currently installed on over 85 million mobile devices produced by Lenovo, LG, Nokia, and Samsung. S60 widgets are marked up using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript…
The Google gadget ecosystem received 960 million pagevieiws last week, a 36% jump from numbers reported by the search giant just one month ago. Users are adding themes, videos, games, and even a few productivity tools to their personalized homepages and blog sidebars, creating new content for fun and business. In this post I’ll provide some new statistics about Google gadget growth over the past month, building upon my larger statistical overview of Google Gadgets in early March. March saw the rebirth of two widget brands, and spring cleaning on a few others. On March 8 Yahoo! launched a major…
Gadget platforms have many levels of integration and customization beyond a metadata wrapper and some markup. Beginners and tinkerers might stick to the basics, but some gadget authors go beyond the plain essentials and add support for multiple languages, tabbed views, and specify any requirements a gadget may expect. In yesterday’s post I provided an overview of the Google Gadgets ecosystem, detailing the types of content and authors producing Google universal gadgets. Today I’ll dive into developer features and observed implementations. Language support Content types Gadget height Top built-in libraries Gadgets produced by Google Extra requirements Summary Language support Google…
Last week the Google Gadgets team released page view numbers for gadgets in its directory, giving outsiders their glimpse of gadget activity across Google Personalized Homepage, Google Desktop, and syndicated throughout the web through Google Gadgets For Your Page. Over the weekend I crawled the entire Google Gadget directory, collecting information about every listed gadget to create a better and more complete understanding of a widget/gadget ecosystem including its level of health, geographic diversity of authors and supported users, popular categories, and some of the most popular gadget programming methods (just to name a few). In this post I’ll share…
Last Friday I visited Six Apart’s headquarters in San Francisco to talk about widgets with Byrne Reese. Byrne is the former product manager of TypePad, currently a product manager of Movable Type, and a developer of plugins and widgets used in both products. Byrne and I talked about the current state of widgets in Six Apart’s four blogging products: TypePad, Movable Type, LiveJournal, and Vox. Our 25-minute conversation about Six Apart widgets is available as a 11 MB audio download. I will summarize a few highlights from our conversation below. Listen to Niall Kennedy interview Byrne Reese of Six Apart…
Netvibes announced a “Universal Widget API” at last week’s Future of Web Apps conference in London, promising a write-once run anywhere widget environment using an open-source widget runtime. The new widget system encourages publishers to author widgets using the Netvibes API and extend the reach of their content beyond the Netvibes user base through an adaptable wrapper. In this post I’ll walk through some of the differences between widget deployment endpoints from the publisher’s point of view, explaining just a few ways a widget must adjust its dialect and structure to adapt and optimize in different widget environments. Manifests Inline…
Yahoo! is opening up the JavaScript powering its websites a bit more tonight, encouraging developers to directly reference libraries on its servers from within their webpages. Yahoo! User Interface Hosting opens up versioned access to the popular YUI Library, creating faster load times for sites across the web using Yahoo’s optimized, geo-distributed, and reliable data centers. Many websites utilize common libraries for JavaScript development, creating a drop-down menu, file retrieval, or chart rendering using a library such as Prototype, script.aculo.us, dojo, and many others. If five Ruby on Rails sites utilize the same script.aculo.us library for effects you’ll have to…
A French security blogger gained access to private user data on personal homepage service Netvibes last weekend, exposing stored usernames and passwords for popular integrated web services as well as user content loaded in the page. The blogger’s account has since been deleted from Blog*Spot (currently cached on Yahoo!), but he provided extended details to French blog Le blog de ¥€$ (English translation). Netvibes has since claimed to patch “a security vulnerability in webnotes” exploited by this developer. I alluded to some of these issues with stored user information, phishing, and general brand confusion in a post two months ago…
Apple released a developer beta version of Dashcode, a widget development environment included in its upcoming Leopard operating system. The preview software is available for Tiger until July. (via Brent Simmons) Dashcode lets anyone design a new widget through a drag and drop interface or by directly editing the underlying code. Bundled widget templates include a countdown timer, latest items from a web feed, web feed single item view, podcast, photocast, and an activity monitor. Dashcode will debug your Dashboard widget code placing all of your files within the appropriate package and generates additional nice touches such as a…
Welcome to 2007! Americans celebrate the dawning of a new year by throwing calendars out the window, watching countless games of college football sponsored by snack foods, and nursing hangovers from a night of rowdy drinking. We emerge from this haze ready to take on a new year of challenges, hopes and dreams. Let’s take a look at three top technology trends I expect will have a big influence on our tech world in 2007
The consumer version of Microsoft’s Windows Vista operating system is only a month away and bloggers are already receiving their first review units. So far the review units sound pretty boring compared to the Windows Vista capable hardware available throughout the world. I put together my own list of five grope-worthy notebook computers ready to test Vista on multiple fronts. You might prefer a silent ultra-portable or a power-hungry luggable. You can search for WiFi without ever opening your computer or get online anywhere with cellular broadband. The latest Apple hardware runs Vista without a problem too. I expect this…
Widgets can be described as mini-applications, running code that binds itself to a web browser and/or the resident operating system to display information. Just like regular applications, widgets consume system resources such as processor cycles, memory, and network bandwidth, possibly slowing down other functions on your computer or across the network. In this post I will take a look at the resource utilization of desktop and web-based widget platforms across a few common widget applications. Background I bought a PowerBook in the summer of 2004 and moved into the world of OS X. Expose and Dashboard were completely new user…
Social networking site Bebo took its first step into the widget realm yesterday, including support for Flash-powered photo slideshow widgets from PhotoBucket, Slide, or RockYou. Each partner site uses the newly created Bebo API to pass a fully configured widget back to Bebo without exposing details such as HTML code snippets to its users. The direct partnerships and whitelisted widgets allow Bebo to slowly add more customization options in a controlled environment, hopefully avoiding some of the security and general exploit issues present on MySpace. Each member profile now has a new widget configuration option. Users can comment on…
Companies who embrace widgets may be less likely to suffer phishing attacks and bloated bandwidth consumed by third-party creations. Popular content will eventually find its way into widget platforms by scrape or by frame, and it’s best to get ahead of the potential pitfalls and embrace the new medium. Two types of widgets have been on my mind this weekend as a potential issue for companies who fail to ride the widgets wave. Protecting user information Sites with personal user data placed behind a username and password may be subject to new types of phishing attacks from the widget web….
A Korean company specializing in smartphone development is releasing a hardware device next year focused on widgets. The WidgetStation from Emtrace Technologies has both a mono and color LCD and receives content update over Ethernet and/or USB connections. It’s a mini computer with an ARM processor, NAND flash memory for local storage, and RAM. The mono LCD is designed for long-term display items such as a clock or weather while the color LCD displays built-in and customizable content from the Internet or your desktop, including support for audio playback. Emtrace’s past developing for smartphones in a mobile-heavy culture such…
Yesterday’s Widgets Live! conference provided an overview of an industry but I think there is enough interest in the social networking space to warrant a separate conference. I think Fox Interactive Media and Adobe should partner to create a MySpace conference in the first quarter of 2007 focused on integrating your content, brand, or products on MySpace. The event would cover topics such as the development of widgets, the right and wrong way to engage a social media community, help create new SpringWidgets and outline ways to work with Fox Interactive Media for continued success. There are currently lots of…
I received a few e-mails this morning from people interested in how Widgets Live! came together. Yep, the event really was planned in about a month, from site selection to the actual day-long event. In this post I’ll outline how Widgets Live! grew from an idea to an in-person event. July 12 Coming up short on ideas for my weekly podcast with Om Malik, I suggested we talk about widgets and how they are changing web publishing. I had been playing around with widgets as a form of web feed syndication, specifically thinking of performance on Live.com and other views…
Yesterday’s Widgets Live! conference was a success! Over 200 people involved in the widget ecosystem came together to discuss the current state of the industry, show off their work, meet new people, and learn new things. There were two big takeaways for attendees: we’re just getting started and the widget world is a bit too fractured. Highlights from the day Arlo Rose talked about getting a call from a friend at Apple after a meeting discussion “steamrolling” his product and small company, Konfabulator. Apple later released Dashboard. Fox Interactive Media launched Spring Widgets, a new desktop and web-based widget hybrid….
The first ever conference dedicated to widgets, gadgets, and modules will take place on Monday, November 6, in San Francisco. The one-day conference will capture and summarize the emerging widget economy and allow developers, business leaders, and content producers to collaborate and better understand how they might participate in syndication at the edge of the network. A small web loosely joined. I am organizing a conference named Widgets Live! next month in partnership with Om Malik to capture the emerging webspace of widgets. There’s so much happening in the fast-moving widget space right now it’s a bit difficult to keep…
Google “Universal” Gadgets are now available for blogs and pages around the web. A single Google gadget can now be deployed on Google Personalized Homepage, Google Desktop, Google Page Creator, or via a JavaScript embed on any editable webpage. You can add PacMan to your blog sidebar or display photos uploaded to Picassa on your MySpace page, or add a Google Reader viewer anywhere. Google’s support for webpage embeds brings the Google Reader story full circle. The team originally envisioned an RSS widget available on a blog sidebar and the project grew into much more. You can now access the…
A small group of of Fox Interactive Media employees are working on a new widget platform called TheSpringBox. TheSpringBox allows users to embed Flash widgets in any webpage and download their favorite widgets to the desktop engine for more frequent use. The new widget engine was developed by FIM Labs just outside Atlanta in Marietta, Georgia. (via Mashable) The existence of another desktop and webpage widget engine isn’t too big of a deal, but this is a platform under development from Fox Interactive Media, home of MySpace and a huge widget economy. Peter Chernin, COO of parent company News…
iGoogle users can now add a Google Gadget to their homepage showing recommended searches, pages, and gadgets based on behavior across Google search properties. The new service builds on top of Google’s search history trends data by adding recommended destination pages and new homepage gadgets. The widget was written by “Beverly Y.” in Google’s New York office. I found the recommendations useful with some expected content and a few surprises thrown in as well. “Burning Man” might be geo-targetted since I live in San Francisco, but three RSS recommendations in the top 5 is right on. I was researching…
The Wall Street Journal launched a new personalized homepage with Dow Jones content modules as well as customized content from any RSS feed. The new site uses Yahoo! UI Widgets extensively, the first time I have seen the libraries on a high-profile site. My WSJ does not seem to currently support Atom 1.0 feeds….
Adobe released version 9 of its popular Flash player in June, boasting 10x performance increases and a variety of new video, audio, and security filters. MySpace worked with Adobe on new security settings for Flash embeds on its sites and required its members upgrade to the new plugin version for access to Flash content on the site. The new player release combined with the MySpace required upgrade created a lot of confusion around the future of embedded widgets on MySpace and other popular web properties. I spoke with Emmy Huang, senior product manager of the Flash 9 plugin at…
MySpace recently required all widgets upgrade to Flash Player 9 (ActionScript 3) and disable internal links.
BloxPress is a theme and template engine for WordPress that allows viewers of your blog to configure their own widget modules in your sidebars. If Bill likes to view the last 10 comments and Jane likes to see your latest Flickr uploads, they can have both at once with their own configuration. Individual user preferences are stored in a cookie and anyone can create their own “blocks” for the system. Check out the demo to see the system in action. It’s too bad the blocks do not seem to interoperate with any other widget definition format. I’m glad Spaces…
Widgets are taking over the web, small pieces at a time. Big web destinations are opening their templates to custom configurations by users and pre-configurations with special partners. Mix and match your favorite content from around the web on your personal start page from Microsoft, Google, or Netvibes. Share a few live and always updating bits of information in your blog sidebar using widgets on WordPress or TypePad. Small(er) businesses can leverage the huge distributions of users across most of the top web properties. Over half of the top Internet companies for home users currently open up their pages for…
Yahoo! released version 3.1 of its Widget Engine today including a new widget that displays the latest headlines from your My Yahoo! feeds. The new widget, Yahoo! My Headlines, allows you to see the latest headlines, source feed, and publish time of your My Yahoo! feed subscriptions….
Starting next week I will join Microsoft’s Windows Live division to create a new product team around syndication technologies such as RSS and Atom. I will help build a feed syndication platform leveraged by Microsoft products and developers all around the world. I am excited to construct a team and product from scratch focused on scalability and connecting syndication clients and their users wherever they may exist: desktop, mobile, media center, gaming console, widget, gadget, and more. Live.com is the new default home page for users of the Internet Explorer 7 and the Windows Vista operating system. Live.com will be…
In the beginning, there was text. Early feed applications such as Netscape’s In-Box Direct, PointCast, and Microsoft Active Desktop transformed existing data formats such as a newspaper and its articles, summaries, and full-text and applied traditional publishing thoughts to a new transport medium. Almost 10 years after then introduction of early web feed formats we are just starting to tap into the full potential of feeds as a descriptive data format with rich payloads and more easily discoverable content. Desktop aggregation The desktop has been the traditional home of feed experiences. Our desktop aggregators are full of text-heavy content (preferably…
AOL Instant Messenger is now officially available to external developers for custom presence, add-ons, and full integration of AIM into existing applications. I signed up for a developer key and I’ve implemented my AIM presence to my contact page as a first step. The new AIM developer features open up new methods of integration for everyone from the independent publisher all the way up to big corporations. AIM Presence You can now integrate your AIM status into web pages and other applications to let people know when you are online. You can also communicate your idle status, away message,…
The latest episode of Om and Niall PodSessions is now available. This week’s theme is APIs and the new opportunities for service providers, developers, and end users. Kevin Burton of TailRank joined us to add an independent developer perspective to this week’s discussion. This week’s session is 26 minutes and 28 seconds in length and a 12.2 MB download. Topics Amazon introduced its Alexa web search platform on Monday. The new services give developers the ability to use content from Alexa’s crawler data and other web services in a hosted environment. Amazon is letting developers upload their own data, process…
Yesterday Google announced an API to add content to the Google personalized homepage using a custom XML file. Last night I coded my first Google homepage widget to display a Technorati Mini on my personalized homepage with a pre-populated value of my blog URL. Here’s how you can check it out: Go to the Google personalized homepage and sign-in. Click on “Add Content” in the top-left corner. Create a developer section by adding a feed URL of “developer.xml.” You will now see a new “My Modules” section. Add a module by entering with http://www.niallkennedy.com/gmodule.xml in the URL field. You…
The New York Times reports Google plans to introduce a new version of Google Desktop on Monday and a “communications tool” on Wednesday. The new Google Desktop will feature live content panels allowing developers to write their own widgets associated with Google Desktop. A beta version of Google Desktop version 2 is now available on the Google Desktop site. What communications tool will Google introduce on Wednesday? Google mobile? Google IM? We have a few days to speculate. Tags: googledesktop…