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.
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…
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…
