Sexy Widget: FavoriteThingz Widget

FavoriteThingz Widget Review

Like the ThisNext widget, the FavoriteThingz widget is a distributed shopping widget which allows users to create lists of brands, people, or products that they like, and display them on the blog, social networking profile page, or personal Web site.

FavoriteThingz was developed by Sprout Commerce, the makers of MyPickList, and is clearly meant to target the MySpace generation. The Flash based widget has various choices for fancy transitions, and the site itself features celebrity favorites from folks like Britney Spears and Ashlee Simpson.

The service offers revenue sharing based on affiliate conversions driven by FavoriteThingz badges, though it was unclear to me exactly what the revenue share of the affiliate commission is between the publisher and FavoriteThingz. The site’s language says as follows:

A commission is earned when someone makes a qualifying online purchase from one of our preferred partners through a registered members FavoriteThingz badge/widget. PLEASE NOTE: Only merchants listed as preferred partners offer cash back.

Applications and Opportunity

In addition to the social shopping factors described here, FavoriteThingz would appear to be trying to leverage teens’ tendency to associate themselves with the brands that they consume. Indeed, the widget itself looks like an ad to me. The FavoriteThingz widget appears to be an attempt get teens to act as an ad delivery mechanism. This shouldn’t be surprising given that this is social shopping, but FavoriteThingz’s execution just feels much less nuanced than ThisNext’s, which feels more like a tool to help friends share info among themselves.

Unlike ThisNext, the FavoriteThingz widget is Flash based, and works fine with MySpace, Friendster, and other sites that don’t allow scripts.

If FavoriteThingz can become the preferred method for MySpacers to show off what brands and products their using, they have a big upside. Conversely, if Fox Media decides that they don’t want FavoriteThingz slipping affiliate dollars out the back door from their user base, they could have a big distribution problem.

Configuration

I really struggled to configure my FavoriteThingz widget. As is my wont, I tried to throw my weight behind supporting the Negra Modelo brand. Unfortunately this brand was not yet in the FavoriteThingz database so I had to try the manual configuration option.

The manual configuration option asks you to fill in the name of the item, and add an image – either by adding the url of the image, or uploading the image.

Just to see what would happen, I added a Flickr url that corresponded to a picture of a Negra Modelo bottle. This resulted in an error message from the site that said, “You must add at least one item to your list.”

I then browsed around on Google Images for a suitable picture. I first tried uploading an image that was about 35KB – it resulted an error about the image being too big. I then tried one that was 23KB, same error. I finally found one that was 13KB, but even that was too big for the system. And nowhere did the tool tell me what the size limit was. It turned out to be a big waste of my time.

After spending about ten minutes battling the image upload tool, I relented and sold out Negra Modelo and instead selected a preloaded Guinness logo.

Once you battle through the item add process, FavoriteThingz offers you a very slick customization tool that allows you to format your badge, and to choose from three neat transitions. This part worked fine, and is helped by a very cool preview feature.

At the time of writing, FavoriteThingz only had about 1,000 products/brands in their database. Given how much they need manual product adds, they must find a way to make this image add process a heck of a lot easier, or it will be a major hurdle to adoption.

Testing

FavoriteThingz offers two different snippets of code for implementing your widget: one optimized for MySpace, and one optimized for everywhere else.

The FavoriteThingz widget is too wide for this TypePad blog's sidebar. The right column gets cut off, and other than going into the code, I didn’t see a formatting option that would have allowed me to choose something that was sidebar friendly. (this may be because MyPicklist is for blogs, and FavoriteThingz is for MySpace)

I had no problems adding the widget to MySpace or Blogger.

One comment about the display of the widget: it appears that the FavoriteThingz guys really took the importance of viral adoption to heart. Rolling your mouse over any portion of the widget triggers big text that invites you to learn more about FavoriteThingz. Oddly, however, nowhere does the widget display my user name, as in, “LCoburn’s Favorite Thingz.” I really think that as is, this particular widget could be confused an ad served by the hosting site that is no way related to the user. This is problematic, I think.

Editorial

FavoriteThingz has done a nice job making a widget that is accessible to each of the major online communities. Their widget customization and preview tools are impressive, and I believe that the revenue sharing program is an important marketing tool.

However, the problems that I had in manually adding a favorite brand of mine to their database don’t bode well for the prospects of massive adoption of this widget. Additionally, the over emphasis on promoting their own service via their widget – at the expense of the user being able to effectively convey that the widget is portraying something personal about them – would seem to defeat the whole point of social product recommendations as a form of self expression.

These issues are fixable, but with services like ThisNext executing very well, I would imagine that time is of the essence.

Click through to leave your own review of the FavoriteThingz widget.