Sexy Widget

The New RateItAll Consumer Review Widget

Today RateItAll launched a read / write consumer review widget that we are very proud of.  The publishing experience is not bad for such a small footprint, the widget is fast, and Facebook Connect is provided as a login option.  More importantly, we think this widget makes consumer reviews accessible to the high percentage of Internet users who are quite comfortable copying and pasting a chunk of code, but not so comfortable developing on an API.

The widget is available for the more than 2.2M items in our database, including everything from movies, to local businesses, to gadgets, to beverages, to politicians, and much more.  You can see it modeled in the sidebar of this blog - try posting a review.

We've gone to market with more than 100 launch partners.  Here are some of them:

Web Apps: 2Big2Send, Buxfer, Medgle, CitiAlly, CleanTechies, Tripsay, Cloud Disk, Commuto, Colnect, ExpertsColumn, Fan History, Fantazzle, FreeTideTables.com, Lefora, Mavrev, Morthix, MyGridironSpace, MyWikiBiz, OurConvo, PlayPing, Producteev, RaaajChat, Rainfall of Envelopes, RentersQ, Resnooze, Stuffpit, TasteKid, TechMunch, Tubefilter, TweekGeek.com, TweetTweetMe, Vigster, WaTunes

Agencies: Samasource, ElaborateSEM, Compu-Clean, Designious, Dreams Media, Vertical Measures, Goldstein Media, GSolutions Online, InterGraphicDESIGNS, JR Language Translation Agency, Webfeathers, Your Design Online

Software: Crossloop, Addaptron, Screencast Pro, TBG Security

Blogs: Sexy Widget (!), Stuntdubl, Sprol, eBykr, The Noe Farm Report, LenaCardell.com, The RateItAll Blog, Stickiwidgets, Easy Green Living, F***ART Blog, Mobile Buzz

eCommerce Sites: Asanea Gifts, Decorish.com, Giftah, Juvie, Kan Thai Decor, Active Health Supply

Online Comics: The System

Ad Networks: BlogUpp

Musicians: Giovanni String Quartet, Buddy Ivory

Local Businesses: Align Chiropractic, Miami Carpet Cleaning, The Finer Details, Back to the Past Comics, Fix'n'Tweak Computer Services, Hollywood Tans, Horizon Yacht Charters, Kokopelli Ski Holidays, Theresa Minnette Photography

To get your own widget for your site, blog, product, self, or anything else, click HERE.

Widget Smackdown Event - June 17

Well,this should be fun.

I am moderating an all-star studded widget event at SF New Tech on Wednesday, June 17.

This won't be your typical panel of demos.  We will be comparing, side by side, head to head, several of the biggest and most innovative players in the widget space.

Clearspring vs. Gigya in widget infrastructure

Sellit vs. Adgregate Markets in widget commerce

Sprout vs. iWidgets in widget publishing

On hand will be Hooman Radfar, Carnet Williams, Peter Yared, Kurt Collins, Rooly Eliezerov, and Henry Wong representing their respective companies.  If you are interested in widgets and distributed web strategy, this is a can't miss event.

There may even be a surprise product announcement.

What went wrong with Splashcast's widget?

Splashcast today announced that they are discontinuing the free widget publishing tool that won them so much early acclaim from sites like TechCrunch, Webware, and yes, Sexy Widget.  Splashcast looked so promising that TechCrunch's lead editor at the time (and one of the top social media analysts, now writing for RWW), Marshall Kirkpatrick jumped ship and joined Splashcast as their Director of Content.

I described Splashcast as follows in my January, 2007 post:

SplashCast has just launched an ambitious service that lets you broadcast content channels (made up of video, RSS feeds, text, music, photos, etc.) to a Flash widget that can be embedded on blogs or profile pages.  Modifying a content channel via your SplashCast control panel updates that channel wherever it appears around the Web.

It was write once, post anywhere.  It pulled in multiple media channels.  And it was nicely put together.

In discussing what went wrong, CEO Mike Berkley had some interesting quotes today on TechCrunch:

“Most of us would rather consume than create. This is one of the big ticket findings of the Web 2.0 technology wave.”

“We were hoping to launch a publishing revolution. What we found, however, is that very few users are willing and able to make an ongoing commitment to publishing and distributing content. Lots of users test; few stick with it.”

“Like so many other Web 2.0 companies, we simply haven’t found a way to meaningfully monetize user generated content. Users are loathe to pay meaningful subscription fees. Furthermore, advertising on user-generated video content hasn’t played out—just ask YouTube.”

And from the Splashcast blog, from Tom Turnbull:

"Three months ago, we asked you (our publishing community), whether you would be willing to pay for the service.  The vast majority answered “no.”  Furthermore, among those willing to pay, the average amount was extremely low."

"Additionally, advertising is not a realistic option.  We’ve explored several approaches.  While we love your content, advertisers aren’t willing to pay a reasonable price to sponsor it."

My own thoughts on Splashcast?  I would agree with much of what these guys said - to run a business off of ads showing up in widgets, you need tremendous scale.  Clearspring or Gigya kind of scale.

And precisely because Splashcast's tool was such a hit with the early adopter community, might have played a role in why it wasn't destined to reach that sort of scale.

This was no mass market product - this was a powerful, complex tool designed to appeal to creative, early adopters.  Which it did.

Musestorm has a robust widget publishing tool that they chose to license to agencies.  Sproutbuilder turned off the free version of their widget publishing tool in January, instead choosing to license it to big brands.

Ad supported businesses need scale to have a chance.  Ad supported widget businesses need massive scale, because of the small footprint, and lack of placement control associated with widgets.  And the more complicated your product is, perhaps the less likely you are to reach that scale.

Of course, I noted none of these points in my early review of Splashcast.  It sounds like they have a promising plan b in their "Social TV" product, and I wish them the best of luck in their transition.

When will Google Expose Local Business Data to Developers?

It seems like a lot of companies are working on location based applications in an effort to serve the growing number of people accessing the Internet from a mobile device.  One of the more common application types is to detect the location of the user, and display local businesses near them - apps like Yelp, GoodRec, UrbanSpoon, and as of today, Google all do a pretty good job of this.  Other apps like Foursquare and Brightkite attempt to do slightly different things based on local business data, and there are countless other web applications built on top of local business data.

The common denominator needed to build these sorts of applications is access to up to date and accurate local business information - business name, street address, phone number, city and state, zip code.

As of today, there are two ways to get this sort of data in large quantities; 1) scrape it from other services; 2) license it from companies like Acxiom and InfoUSA.

Local business data is notoriously difficult to keep up to date.  I've heard estimates that up to 40% of all local business data goes stale per quarter.  With a centralized approach, such as the call centers operated by Acxiom and InfoUSA, it is a costly (and lucrative) proposition to keep this data fresh.

To me, the sale of local business data seems like an industry in grave danger of getting wiped out.

Yesterday, Google announced a new local business dashboard, designed to incentivize local businesses to claim their listing on Google.  Claiming a business means being responsible for keeping its data updated, thus eliminating the need for centralized data providers.

Would it shock anyone if Google were to expose this local business information in exchange for attribution, much like they did with the Google Maps API?  Not only would a local business data API represent another snippet of code to suck analytics data back from countless websites, but Google's mobile platform, Android, would stand to benefit from increased numbers of location based applications.

This wouldn't be the first time that Google wiped out an industry overnight - just ask those that competed with Urchin, now Google Analytics.

The Outside In Social Media Strategy

I've been talking a lot on this blog about maximizing your site's distribution via social media river services like Facebook and Twitter. 

And there are LOTS of folks working on this.  In just the past few weeks, Socializr, Digg, Lunch.com, and my employer RateItAll, to name a few, have announced tighter Facebook and Twitter integration.  Spymaster is an even more pronounced example of a service that is uber-optimized for Twitter distribution.

The idea here is pretty simple - find ways to push, or help your users push, your site's activity out into the larger social media rivers, with the hopes of driving clicks back to home base.

Let's call this the Inside Out strategy.

But what would happen if we we flipped this strategy on its head?  What if in addition to optimizing your site's activity for distribution on Facebook and Twitter, you tweaked your service to accept content from activity within those services? 

Here are some examples of what I'm talking about:

- a blog comments service in which you could post your comment on Twitter or your Facebook status
- a polling app where you could create your poll via a tweet
- a social game where points are earned via activity on Facebook and Twitter (Spymaster incorporates a bit of this)
- a rating app where ratings could be published via a tweet or status update

Outside In is not a new strategy.  There are plenty of examples out there - Posterous posts are created via another app (email) and aggregated on Posterous.com.  The vast majority of content on FriendFeed originates on other networks.  The appropriately named Outside.in pulls in blog posts from around the web that have a hyperlocal slant.  Mahalo's QA site has a scraper that pulls in questions (any question) from Twitter (sometimes against the will of the originating site), and the defunct Edgeio was an early pioneer in aggregating classified ad listings.  All of these services refused to restrict the content publishing piece of their service to their own domain.

Other than Friendfeed, which doesn't really count as it's story agnostic, I haven't seen any services gain traction by coming up with a standard to accept content via Twitter or Facebook statuses:

e.g. #poll What's the best blog? #1 Sexy Widget #2 Widgify #3 Sprol

The main hurdles to overcome would seem to be A) The simplicity of the posting format; and B) the character limit.

I expect to see some folks try though.

Widgets: Back from the Dead?

If you believe Google Trends, popular interest in the term "widgets" peaked somewhere in the middle of 2007.  Around this time, Google announced that they would be dropping ads into their widg... ahem, gadgets .... and the MySpace widget ecosystem was in full swing.  This was also the period in which Facebook announced their developer platform, whose applications were widely compared to widgets.

A look at this same graph will tell you that interest in widgets has been in gradual decline since then - in fact, we would appear to be at similar levels of interest as we were in late 2005, before the first YouTube widget hit MySpace. 

But just when you thought that those lovable chunks of embeddable code had run their course, widgets now seem to be roaring back.

Data Point #1

At this week's Google I/O conference, widgets played a significant role in each of the morning's keynotes.  On Day 1, Google VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra spoke extensively of "cut and paste programming," and announced the exposing of a whole new suite of widgets, cleverly called Google Web Elements.  Several of Google's most successful properties including search, maps, and calendar, are now available in embeddable, widget form.

On Day 2, it was announced that Google's most ambitious product announcement in some time, Google Wave, will be supported by an embed API.  The key premise here is that the Google Wave format, which is part email, part bulletin board, part IM, and part document, will proliferate via embed to social networks and blogs.

Data Point #2

Widget infrastructure company Clearspring, after several months of quiet execution, has announced that their widgets are now reaching more than 500M users a month, more than half of the Internet's population.  As founder Hooman Radfar says in a blog post:

"...if we were a publisher, only Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have larger reach."

Data Point #3

Union Square Ventures just announced an investment in HeyZap, a distributed social gaming company that, if you believe their site's navigation, is emphasizing proliferation via widgets and APIs over all else.  This is interesting as Union Square Ventures' Fred Wilson, once once of the biggest advocates of widgets, had more recently cooled to them, paring back widgets on his own blog and suggesting that widget makers needed to figure out how to get out of the sidebar and into the river.

To me, HeyZap looks like a good, old fashioned widget play from 2006 - in fact, just like one I covered on this blog.  And I'm not disparaging that - I thought that a YouTube for games was a good idea then, and I think it's a good idea now.

Summary

While one week does not a resurgence make, when thought leaders like Google and Union Square Ventures throw their weight behind widgets (again), and a leading widget company announces the kind of reach that Clearspring did, you have to stop and take notice.

And I have to say, the timing couldn't be better.

As luck would have it, I am moderating what we are calling a Widget Smackdown event in San Francisco on June 17.  Participating companies are: Clearspring and Gigya, iWidgets and Sproutbuilder, and AdGregate Markets and Sellit.  Details will be posted on SFNewTech.

Google Web Elements (Why Can't Google Just Say "Widget?")

I had the pleasure of being at Google I/O this morning, the impressively well run and generous celebration of developers that Google has hosted here in San Francisco for the past two years.

Eric Schmidt kicked things off with the message of "The Time is Now" (to finally realize the dream of the Web as the ultimate programming platform).  Schmidt was followed by a number of senior Google engineering lieutenants as well as a few token engineering executives from companies like Mozilla and Palm.

There was a lot of attention paid to how far the browser has come in terms of speed, as well as the promise that HTML 5 holds for both users and developers.

The portion of the keynote most relevant to readers of this blog was the launch of "Google Web Elements" - an attempt to bring the same embed / cut and paste programming that is available for YouTube to other Google products.  Yes, this is what the rest of the world calls a "widget." 

And no, I am not changing this blog's name to "Sexy Web Element."

Specifically, Google is now exposing embeddable JavaScript snippets for the following Google Products:

- Calendar
- Conversation / Commenting (watch out Disqus, JS-Kit?)
- Custom Search (neat because it isolates the host domain and other domains that you choose, watch out Lijit?)
- Maps
- News
- Presentations (watch out Slideshare?)
- Spreadsheets
- YouTube

Here's an example of the commenting widget:

And here's an example of the custom search widget:

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For more on Google Web Elements, see Technologizer.

Why we Built our own URL Shortener

My employer, RateItAll, recently launched some enhanced sharing tools with the goal of maximizing distribution via email, Facebook, and Twitter.

I will likely share more of the specifics of what we did in regards to sharing in a future post, as I think we're doing some neat things.

As part of our Twitter project, we decided to build our own URL shortener as opposed to using an existing service like Bit.ly or TinyURL.

Here are the reasons we did this:

1. It preserves our brand in tweets.  Our brand happens to say exactly what we do.  It's a description of the service, and hopefully, a means to attract new users.  We felt it was important that our brand be preserved as our service gets tweeted and retweeted.
2. It was easy.  Setting this up for four different types of links took us a few hours.
3. We have a fairly short domain name.  By using our own URL as opposed to Bit.ly's, we don't lose all that much in terms of saving space against a 140 character limit.
4. It protects us against third party services deciding to change the rules.  To its credit, Bit.ly is currently a search engine friendly redirect, meaning that link juice appropriately gets transferred to the destination domain.  There's no guarantee that Bit.ly will stay that way.

You can see our sharing tools and url shortener in action on this page about Star Trek characters.

For more technical posts on URL shorteners, see Joshua Schachter and Danny Sullivan.

Why Facebook / Twitter 2009 are more Defensible than MySpace 2006 or Friendster 2003

I spend as much time as I can hanging out with other entrepreneurs.  The opportunity to do so is a huge advantage that I have living in San Francisco, and it's one that I don't take for granted.  It energizes me to hear what other folks are working on, and to trade stories about the ups and downs of startup life.

And one thing that is increasingly dawning on me is that we are all working on the same damn thing: distribution.

Just about every startup that I come across is working on optimizing their sites / service / content for distribution on Facebook and Twitter.  Sure, old fashioned email sharing is still getting a nod, as are some of the bursty drivers of traffic like Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon, and you'll see the occasional MySpace distribution project - but for the most part, it's all about Facebook and Twitter.

Everyone wants to guide their little streams of content into the larger rivers of Facebook and Twitter with the hopes of gaining more distribution.  Everyone wants to hitch their wagons to Facebook and Twitter's meteoric growth, because as we know, a rising tide lifts all boats.

It's a little unnerving to see everyone working on the same thing - in this industry, it's often the folks that aren't working on what everyone else is working on who thrive.  But I'll save that discussion for another day.

The larger implication of all these man hours going into wiring a myriad of services into Facebook and Twitter's rivers is a fortifying of those two companies against future competitors.  If Facebook's newsfeed comes pre-wired with every popular web service, it's a massive advantage.  If every popular Web service uses Twitter for alerts / notifications / shouts, it will be an almost insurmountable task for a future competitor to take them on.

Fred Wilson posted yesterday that once you become a default behavior, you're tough to knock out.  I will go one step farther and say that if you are a default behavior AND thousands of complementary services have put in serious labor to wire their services to yours, you are sitting pretty indeed.

Social Distribution and Search

There's a post up today from Rafe Needleman reporting on the Churchill Club Top Tech Trends Event, that continues the gathering meme of social media being a threat to search.

Rafe reports that one of the key trends that prognosticators are pushing is that Google's search dominance, which depends on a centralized, black box algorithm to tell you what the best match for your query is, could be at risk to losing out to the distributed, implicit wisdom of the crowds.

Venture capital whiz-kid Steve Jurvetson gave an impassioned pitch for this trend, which he called, "The triumph of the distributed Web." He said the aggregate power of distributed human activity will trump centralized control. His main point was that Google, and other search engines that analyze the Web and links, are much less useful than a (theoretical) search engine that knows not what people have linked to (as Google does), but rather what pages are open on people's browsers at the moment that people are searching. "All the problems of search would be solved if search relevance was ranked by what browsers were displaying," he said.

Jurvetson believes that the future is "federated search," in which the Web's users don't just execute search queries, they participate in building the index by the very act of searching, immediately and directly.

This is a bit farther out than I've been looking recently on my posts on passed links and social distribution.

While I am not sure about how the mechanics might work of a distributed, human built search index, I do know there is value in capturing which links are being passed via social media, which links are getting clicked on, and the themes that are associated with those links.

Hence the interest in Bit.ly and URL shorteners in general.  How long will it be before Bit.ly launches a destination site using the findings of all of their link data?