Sexy Widget

Last.FM has a Flash player

Last.FM just announced a bunch of new features including a Flash player.  You no longer have to download the Last.FM player to listen to your custom radio station.

They have not yet announced an embaddable version of this player.

Here's my theory: they saw what iLike announced a few days ago - a hybrid listening history widget / embeddable player - and rather than just launching the radio station player widget, they are figuring out how the Flash player can be leveraged with their existing play history widgets.

Random, somewhat obvious thought

It's not the proliferation of widgets that tipped the demand for self-serve, third party, embeddable software - it's the proliferation of places to put those widgets.

Webmasters have used widgets in various formats for years and years - most notably in the form of affiliate, stat tracking, and ad network code.

It wasn't until MySpace (and to a lesser extent blogs) came along that the demand for widgets went mainstream.

MySpace has clearly had a number of social and cultural impacts on the wired world - perhaps their most profound technical innovation was their decision to trust their users enough to mess around with their HTML.

BunchBall Widget – A Review

BunchBall is a social gaming site that offers a variety of Flash-based game widgets for blogs and social networking profile pages.  Most of the games are of the classic variety – stuff like Asteroids and Space Invaders, and an IM service is built into the bottom of the widget.

BunchBall has been in the news recently because they just closed their Series A round of funding.  Pete Cashmore has the coverage here. 

According to Pete's coverage, BunchBall also plans to offer ad revenue sharing with sites hosting their widgets.

Applications & Opportunity

Like embeddable video, games are sticky, viral content that can keep viewers coming back.  About a year ago, I put up a BunchBall widget of the classic game Snake on another blog that I write.  That post became one of the blog’s most popular posts.

Unlike most of the other widgets covered in this blog, BunchBall widgets are participative experiences that go beyond a one way flow of content.  Furthermore, the social aspect in which users compete with each other for high scores, or even play against each other, can enhance community among a blog’s readership, and provide the publisher with another vehicle to enable reader to reader interaction.

It would seem that these sorts of games would be a nice fit for the MySpace community.  Like the Quizilla widget, these things are pure entertainment.  No shopping, no commercial undertones, just games.  But for whatever the reason, the BunchBall widget has not taken off with MySpace yet.  If you do a “site:myspace.com BunchBall” search on Google, it returns 16 results.  Compare that to 972,000 results for “site:myspace.com Quizilla.

So is BunchBall just in need of a few tweaks to get things rolling with MySpace adoption, or are the deeper, more structural challenges?

Configuration & Testing

BunchBall’s configuration tool is fairly straightforward.  It lets you select the destination for your widget from each of the big social networking and blogging communities (and some smaller ones), and offers one click add functionality with TypePad.

You can adjust the colors and size of the widget, and the thing scales down pretty well to fit most sidebars (see the mini Space Invaders in my left sidebar). 

As a Flash-based widget, BunchBall games will fit just about anywhere that allows embeds.

BunchBall makes, in my opinion, two poor decisions regarding their configuration process; 1) they provide the widget code in a pop-up window (which was blocked initially by my browser; and 2) They require a registration before you can grab a widget.

Editorial

So why hasn’t BunchBall seen a larger adoption among the MySpacers who should be their sweet spot?  I’m not sure, but I have a couple of theories.  The forced registration isn’t helping, for sure.  I’m also not convinced that a MySpace crowd who has been raised on games with stunning graphics can appreciate the classic games.

Don’t get me wrong – I think I understand why BunchBall requires registration.  Like MyBlogLog, they are trying to build a distributed social network across their widgets, and to provide community in a box to blog and site publishers.  If you take a look at the BunchBall.com home page, the emphasis is on social gaming, and on tying their widgets into existing social networks and IM communities.  Forced registration may also be a requirement of their revenue sharing strategy. 

However, I would much rather see them remove all obstacles to the proliferation of their widgets, and if anything, require a quick registration to play a game.  This would still give them the opportunity to start building a community among participants of their widgets.

I see the gaming widget space as tremendously exciting.  If I had to choose one vertical with the potential to produce a widget with YouTube-esque breakout potential, it would be gaming.  Things will really get exciting when games are developed specifically for distributed, widget-ized play.

I’m not sure if BunchBall’s current offering of classic games and forced registration is the right recipe to produce a winner.   Now that BunchBall has raised some money, they have more options in front of them.  As they have probably been thinking longer and harder about distributed, widget-ized gaming than anyone else, it will be interesting to see which direction they take.

 

iLike Widget – A Review

The Last.FM widget may have met its match with the launch of iLike.

iLike is a social networking service with an iTunes plugin that gives you music recommendations based on your listening habits, facilitates introductions to likeminded listeners, and provides you with free downloads from up and coming bands.

The iLike widget is a Flash-based widget that displays tracks listened to via iTunes, and allows viewers to play samples of some tracks within the body of the widget.

Configuration & Testing

If you believe iLike’s site navigation, widget generation is expected to be a critical piece of their business.  There are only four navigation options – invite friends, view profile, find people, and share your tastes (widgets).

Clicking the "share" button takes you to the widget set up page.  There are no widget configuration options currently offered by iLike.  The default widget width is 175 pixels, meaning it fits nicely on both MySpace and blog sidebars.

There is a nice MySpace widget add feature that allows you to plug your iLike widget into your MySpace music field without leaving iLike.  The tool asks for your MySpace login info (which it claims not to save) and then does the rest.  I tried it out, and it worked without a problem. 

The widget itself is simple and clean, and allows the viewer to toggle between the last tracks played by the publisher, and the publisher’s overall top played bands.

The widget is nicely branded, with some interesting data tracking information built in.  Running your mouse over the bottom, branded portion of the widget adjusts the url to capture the exact coordinates of your click.  I would imagine that this information will be useful for optimizing the widget in terms of adding advertisements or other features.

But the standout feature is the ability to play some tracks within the body of the widget.  For some tracks, a small “play” button appears next to the track, allowing the viewer to listen to a 30-second portion of the song within the body of the widget.   

It doesn’t seem that iLike’s music sample library is the same as iTunes’ – there are tracks that I purchased on iTunes that won’t play on the iLike widget.  It may be that these track samples come via their connection with Garageband, as reported by Pete Cashmore.

Editorial

For months, the Last.FM widget has been my favorite widget.  It displayed reasonably fresh content without me having to do anything, told people something about me, and tapped into my vanity as a self-proclaimed music snob.

iLike takes this widget a step farther by actually allowing people to play the songs.  This is a huge development in the music widget space, and important enough for me to replace my image based Last.FM widgets with the Flash-based iLike widgets.

ILike also exploits a few more weaknesses of the Last.FM widget.  iLike’s widget updates in real time, while Last.FM’s updates sporadically.  More importantly, the iLike download plugs in directly to iTunes, as opposed to just working with iTunes like Last.FM’s iScrobbler.  In other words, if iTunes is on, iLike is getting the data.  With iScrobbler for OSX, you have to remember to turn on iScrobbler whenever you reboot your computer.  This accounts for some big data gaps on my Last.FM music history on days that I forgot to turn on iScrobbler.  If you compare my overall listening history as captured by Last.FM, it is incomplete, and therefore inaccurate.  iLike gets it completely right.

So to summarize, the iLike widget is fresher, more interactive, and more accurate than Last.FM’s widget.  That’s a pretty powerful combination, and a clear sign that competition is driving innovation in the social music space.

I’m not going to spend a lot of time talking about the iLike site itself – let’s just say it was nice to have some free, reasonably well targeted MP3’s from bands that I hadn’t heard of waiting for me in my site inbox.

I’ll be watching iLike with interest.

ReverbNation Widget – A Review

ReverbNation is a social networking service built around music.  Musicians can use the service to promote themselves, and music fans can use the service to discover new music and interact with likeminded fans.

The site is currently offering a widget that allows site visitors to embed a band’s tour schedule into their blog or personal profile.  The clear target market for this widget is the musicians themselves – ReverbNation’s widget is designed to be a handy tool to allow bands to easily provide up to date show information across all of their online presences.

ReverbNation has not yet launched publicly, and according to the site, a number of additional widgets are planned.

Applications & Opportunity

ReverbNation has positioned itself to compete directly with MySpace.  Site testimonials trumpet that ReverbNation is “Miles beyond MySpace” and the site itself crows “In OURSPACE, music comes first.”

Is there a need for better tools for musicians to promote themselves online than what currently exists?  I don’t see why not.  The leading site for musicians to promote themselves, MySpace, has chosen not to provide promotion tools that extend beyond MySpace itself.

ReverbNation’s pitch to musicians is that by using their more sophisticated promotion tools, musicians can manage their online promotion efforts across all of the major social networking services.  By positioning itself as an aggregator and an edge feeder, there may be room for ReverbNation.

Configuration & Testing

To access a band’s upcoming show widget, you need to click through to the band’s profile page on ReverbNation, then click on the “Shows” tab, and then click on the widget icon.  There are also promotions and help sections for the widget functionality displayed throughout the site.

There are no configuration options offered besides going into the code itself, and the width of the widget is optimized for 424 pixels wide.  I tried to jam the widget into the TypePad sidebar, but as you can see it doesn’t really work in that narrow a space.

But that shouldn’t be a surprise.  This widget is optimized for MySpace (where it looks great), and ReverbNation is clearly trying to make the upcoming shows widget a standard accessory for a band’s MySpace page.

Editorial

Even though they haven’t officially launched yet, ReverbNation is already a very slick, polished offering.  It’s easy to envision them providing an embeddable player, like Streampad, but with each participating band’s permission.  Perhaps what’s most appealing about them is that they have been built from the ground up with an emphasis on sharing content and functionality on an Internet wide basis.

However.  It looks to me that ReverbNation is walking a tightrope here.  On the one hand, they want to be a MySpace killer.  They are trying to replace MySpace as the leading musician promotion service by providing musicians with better promotion tools with Internet wide reach. 

On the other hand, they clearly understand the importance that MySpace will play in driving distribution for their content and musician promotion tools.

So while the site’s language is mildly condescending to MySpace, everything about its widget is geared towards working well with MySpace.

So can they have it both ways?  I’m not sure.  Fox Interactive has already done some saber rattling about their perception that others are freeloading off of their user base.  I’m not convinced that they will stand by while a direct competitor simultaneously disses them, and uses them for distribution.

Of all the widgets that I’ve looked at so far, this would seem to be the one that is most dependent on MySpace for distribution.  It’s not just the formatting – that’s fixable.  It’s the fact that ReverbNation’s target market of musicians, the market that will provide all of the content that will attract a user base, lives on MySpace.  Feeding this market a cool new widget to promote their tour dates is a good first step towards introducing these musicians to ReverbNation’s promotion tools.  But the thing that worries me a little is that ReverbNation is putting their fate in the hands of the site that they are trying to dethrone.  I wouldn’t put it past MySpace to try and shut these guys down before they even get started.

   

PictureCloud Widget – A Review

PictureCloud is a service that allows you to upload sequential photos and create 360 degree views.  The easiest way to think of PictureCloud is as a virtual animator – sequential, static photos are displayed in rapid fire succession in such a way that they appear to be animated.

The PictureCloud service generates a snippet of HTML that can be placed on your blog or social networking profile.  For example, I created a PictureCloud widget of my guitar (see sidebar).

Small images are hosted by PictureCloud for free, while larger images cost $0.99 for one year of hosting.

Applications & Opportunity

It’s easy to think of all sorts of ways that folks might want to use PictureClouds.  The one that jumps out for me is in the world of person to person ecommerce.  When browsing a product listing on Craigslist or eBay, I think it would be pretty helpful to be able to check out a 360 degree view of that product.

I can also imagine folks setting up PictureClouds of themselves to be used on personal profiles on social networking sites – sometimes it might be, uh, illuminating to get a 360 degree view of a person.

The emerging shopcasting sites like ThisNext and Kaboodle might also benefit from integrating a PictureCloud option into their widgets.  Theoretically a PictureCloud could provide an additional level of richness in many situations that you might otherwise use a still photo.

Configuration & Testing

PictureCloud recommends that you take 20-30 photos to create a 360 degree PictureCloud (I only took 12 photos for mine, so it’s a little choppy).  Photos are then uploaded using a neat drag and drop tool – the service uses the sequential titles of the photos (DSC238, DSC239, etc.) to determine the order of the photos.

Once you upload your photos, your PictureCloud is previewed, and a snippet of HTML is generated that allows you to embed your PictureCloud on another site.  There are no widget configuration options provided currently, though it’s fairly easy to go into the HTML to adjust the height and width of the widget.

All told, it took me about ten minutes to get a PictureCloud up and running, from photography to embedding.  I had no problems embedding my PictureCloud into MySpace, TypePad, or Blogger.

Editorial

This is a pretty clever hack.  I’ve had the opportunity to see founder Paul Pattison demo PictureCloud a few different times in a lineup of presenters, and invariably, the PictureCloud demo is the easiest to grasp for the audience.

This simplicity is the core of its effectiveness.  Walk around an object, snap a few pictures, drag them into PictureCloud, and presto, you have a 360 degree view that you can plug in anywhere.  People seem to get this, and they seem to have no problem envisioning ways that this could be useful.

In its current format, users can only embed PictureClouds that they have created.  I think it’s extremely important that PictureCloud open this up to a true User Generated Widget model in which any user can embed any other user’s widget, unless the publisher has specifically indicated their PictureCloud to be private. 

In this way, PictureCloud can start moving towards becoming a Flickr like community for 360 degree views.  There may also be ways to hang additional revenue models off of this type of structure where members wishing to embed other members’ PictureClouds would have to pay after a certain point.  Heck, this might even be the basis for a revenue sharing model a la Zazzle where contributors of popular PictureClouds earn a cut of sales.

Setting up landing pages for various sub-categories of PictureClouds could also form the foundation of their SEO strategy (e.g. “Pickup Trucks – 360 degree views – PictureCloud”).

The biggest challenge that I see for PictureCloud is in creating a niche for itself.  Most Internet users are used to either seeing (or embedding) photos or video.  Is there room for a PictureCloud tier between these two segments?  Can PictureCloud carve out a niche among folks that want to provide more than a still image, but don’t have the tools / savvy to create and embed a video?  I’m not sure, but I think that the nascent vertical of shopcasting could be a powerful vehicle for PictureCloud’s growth.

Sexy Widget is Syndicating Its Content

James Yu and Joel Sacks over at Buzzshout.com's Shoutblog will be syndicating content from Sexy Widget.  Each week they will choose a "widget of the week" from the widgets reviewed on this blog.

If you haven't checked out Shoublog yet, I recommend it.  It's an excellent source of news and analysis from the Web 2.0 world including video interviews with leading startups.

Quizilla Widget – A Review

Do you want to see an example of widget propagation?  Do a Technorati search for Quizilla.com.  An expression that I coined a while back in the comments section of the Mashable blog – feeding the MySpace Beast – would definitely seem to apply here.

Quizilla is a social networking site built around the creation and syndication of little quizzes, polls, and blogs (“stories”).  The demographic seems to be heavily skewed towards teen girls, and widgets clearly play a critical role in the site’s strategic direction.  The site claims 4.7M unique visitors per month, and as reported by Pete Cashmore, was acquired yesterday by MTV.

Applications & Opportunity

I don’t know if Quizilla was originally built with the intention of feeding the millions of profiles of MySpace with interactive content, but that’s certainly where they’ve ended up.  Quizilla quizzes do a couple of things that make them attractive to MySpacers – they engage visitors to a publisher’s profile, and they allow the publisher to share a little bit about themselves with the world.

I won’t lie to you and say I can relate at all to this kind of content – I can’t.  But I can relate to the idea of a business understanding its target market and tailoring its offering precisely to that market.

My guess is that the demand for this type of light, easy, sharable content and functionality is here to stay as long as teen girls continue to gather online in places like MySpace that allow them to customize their profile pages.

I know from personal experience that monetizing this type of content is extremely difficult.  Currently, it would appear that Quizilla is powered by ad and sponsorship revenues.  I can’t imagine that their CPMs get much higher than $1 or so, but at the same time, their costs have to be low considering the vast majority of their content is generated and distributed by their members.  They also don’t appear to be, uh, overspending on site design.

Going forward, I would expect MTV to use Quizilla to promote its various properties, and to gather demographic, taste, and clickstream data about its users.

Configuration and Testing

The Quizilla configuration tool is not in the same league as most of the widgets that I’ve reviewed on this blog.  Site design is cluttered and confusing.  You have to take a quiz in order to grab the widget code for that quiz, and I ran into a number of glitches throughout the process.

What they lack in usability, Quizilla makes up in breadth of options.  Once you finish taking a quiz, Quizilla offers you the option to grab code for six different widgets.  You can grab a widget for the quiz itself, for your result of the quiz, or for four different types of content specific to you (your polls, your stories, your favorites, and your quizzes).

You are given the option to choose four types of code – HTML, Forum / BB (image), iFrame, and “HTML-low tech.”  Quizilla helpfully lists the suggested SNS destination for each type of code.

Quizilla also tries to provide one click add functionality to allow users add the quiz to MySpace without copying and pasting code, but I couldn’t get it to work.

There are some configuration options offered that allow you to customize various colors and the size of the widget (big, medium, and small).  I ran into a few glitches depending on what size I selected.  Most of these glitches were around fitting the widget into a narrow sidebar.  As this is a MySpace targeted product, I don't think this is a big deal.

The widget itself does a nice job of covering the bases of branding and sharing, and provides a few key links back to Quizilla.  The sharing option redirects you back to the Quizilla site, as opposed to letting you grab the code from within the body of the widget.

The experience of interacting with a Quizilla quiz widget is actually very smooth.  You answer various questions set forth by the quiz owner, one after the other within the body of the widget.  Once you answer all the questions, a new browser opens and takes you to the quiz’s answer.   Feel free to try it yourself with the Lion King quiz I have in the sidebar (I most resemble Simba).

Overall, I found the configuration process of Quizilla to be clunky and cluttered.  However, the proof is in the pudding.  The uptake of these widgets would appear to be spectacular, despite the tough UI.  To their credit, it appears as if Quizilla has found a way to package up every bit of content that they collect on their site into widget format.

Editorial

Quizilla is doing something right.  They have ridden their user generated widgets to 4.7M monthly uniques and an exit.  They have clearly thought about a lot of the issues that are central to the success of a widget, in particular the branding and sharing pieces.

I really like how Quizilla is able to fit numerous page views in a smooth fashion, within the experience of the widget.  This functionality gets towards what I was talking about yesterday with Bitty Browser – this is a widget that is not a single snapshot of  content, but a series of pages flowing smoothly within a widget.

I also love the concept of user generated widgets.  Quizilla hosts a community that is generating a massive amount of widgetized content – some good, some not so good.  They do a nice job of providing the tools to let their community ensure that the good stuff gets the most airplay.  Despite the presumably low CPMs, the economics of enabling a community in which all content generation, filtering, and distribution is performed by your users is compelling.

Quizilla has the added benefit of serving a demographic that is persistent and savvy enough to battle through a cluttered interface.  I think there’s a lesson in there – a well designed and useful widget can only take you so far.  At the end of the day, you need to have a user base that is comfortable configuring and installing widgets if you expect to see a significant impact.

Just to hammer this point home, most regular readers of tech blogs know that Fred Wilson is perhaps the most eager adopter of widgets in the blogosphere.  In the MySpace world, everybody is a Fred Wilson.  Everybody is plugging in widgets, testing new stuff, cluttering their pages, and seeing what works.

Pre-acquisition, Quizilla took their limited (?) resources and invested in making anything and everything available in widget format, and made sure that every widget that was out there carried hooks back into their service and the ability to be shared.  They did not focus on interface and usability, trusting their users to be able to figure stuff out. 

It would appear that they guessed right.

Disclosure: I work for a company that enables embeddable, user-generated, interactive ratings lists.

AnswerBag Purchased

AnswerBag, a company/widget that I reviewed several weeks ago, has been purchased by Demand Media.  This happened about two weeks ago, but oddly, I haven't seen any discussion in the blogosphere.

Bitty Browser – A Review

Bitty Browser bills itself as “Picture in Picture for the Web,” and allows users to embed a fully functional, miniature browser within a Web site via a widget.

Bitty Browsers can be pre-loaded with a number of popular Web sites, or can be set to the Bitty home page which displays a directory of Bitty sites.  Users can also type URLs or search terms directly into the address bar.

Applications & Opportunity

From the perspective of a site owner, one of the really neat things about widgets is how they can be used to embed content / functionality snapshots of your site into another site.  As discussed ad nauseam on this blog and others, a properly executed and useful widget can be a phenomenally cost effective marketing tool.

But what if you want to take this further?  What if you want to embed not just a snapshot, but your site’s entire experience into another site?  What if you want to start providing processes and functions within the experience of another site that cannot be adequately conveyed in a single page view?

That’s where Bitty browser comes in.  Bitty browser gives widget publishers the ability to embed their entire site within the experience of another site.  And it gives users the ability to perform more robust combinations of content, functionality, and experience than are possible with standard widgets.

Let’s take for example the case of MyBlogLog.  As discussed previously, MyBlogLog is trying to help blog publishers enhance their mini communities by providing social media tools for their readers.  Currently, thumbnails of recent readers are displayed within the widget, and other readers are able to click through to those readers’ MyBlogLog profiles where they can learn more about the person, and exchange messages.

What if this experience happened within the widget itself?  What if MyBlogLog were able to provide all of its functionality and community enhancing tools within the experience of the host blog?  To me, this is pretty powerful stuff, and demonstrates the potential that Bitty Browser has to take widgets to the next level.

Configuration and Testing

Bitty Browser gives you a couple of choices in terms of configuration.  You can add a standard Bitty Browser to your site, you can add a Bitty Browser preloaded with a number of popular Web sites (ESPN, Yahoo!, etc.), or you can plug in any URL or RSS Feed.

There is a configuration tool provided that allows you to set the Bitty Browser’s dimensions, title, and browser button configuration.  The width setting is provided in % terms as opposed to a set pixel width.  In the past, I’ve had some problems with these sorts of widgets, as there are some popular Blogger templates that haven’t been set up properly, that in certain situations, allow a sidebar widget set at 100% width to leak into the body of the post.  I’d be curious to hear from the Bitty Browser guys if they’ve seen anything similar.

The standout feature of the Bitty Browser configuration process is the one-click adds that they’ve established with blogging platforms such as TypePad and WordPress, and the major customizable home pages such as Netvibes, Pageflakes, and Google.  This is the most comprehensive list of automated add options that I’ve seen in the space.

For all other sites not included among the one click add options, the Bitty configuration tool provides any HTML generator that provides two options; a script-based widget, and an IFrame-based widget.

I had no problems adding Bitty Browser to TypePad, Blogger, or Google Home Page, but IFrames don't work with MySpace.

Editorial

I am overwhelmingly impressed by the Bitty Browser.  I think it gives us a glimpse into the next generation of widgets on several levels – most notably with its ability to embed fully functional sites and its emphasis on providing one click add options.

Another area in which Bitty Browser is ahead of the game is in its inclusion of a revenue model.  The second view within every Bitty Browser widget is a list of Bitty sponsors.  The user is given the option to “Skip To My Selection,” but every user of the Bitty Browser sees a sponsor.  To date, I have not seen any other widget or widget platform (other than the ecommerce widgets) that is tackling the challenge of monetization.

Because of the availability of open source browser software, I wouldn’t think that Bitty functionality would be hard for a widget publisher to duplicate on their own.  However, where Bitty becomes a compelling widget partner is through the work it has put in building an ad network, and the one click add functionality it has established with many of the big aggregators.  Speaking as a publisher, it is crystal clear to me why a widget publisher would want distribute their site through Bitty. 

My sense is that the primary challenge that Bitty faces is that many sites have not been optimized to work within such a small window.  However, Bitty has one big trend in its favor in this area – optimizing a site to work for Bitty Browser is not unlike optimizing a site to display on a mobile phone.  As more sites become mobile phone friendly, Bitty will also the emergence of more content for its browser.

I think that what we are seeing with Bitty Browser is the birth of a next generation widget platform, where the widgets are fully functioning sites, and there is a built in advertising network. 

I would advise feature rich sites whose content and functionality do not fit easily into a snapshot widget structure to take notice of Bitty Browser.  Browser in browser functionality has the potential to join APIs and HTML based widgets as major factors in modulizing the Web.