MuseStorm is an Israel-based widget service provider that I’ve been keeping an eye for a while (see mentions here and here) that has been making good progress. They recently launched a service that makes it easy to convert any RSS feed into a slick, Flash widget.
Besides the ease of publishing, widgetizing your content with MuseStorm has other benefits. Widgets configured with MuseStorm come equipped with MuseStorm’s analytics package. This stats package breaks down impressions by date, impressions by geo (not working yet), and impressions by the following social networks (Piczo, Freewebs, MySpace, Multiply, Xanga, hi5, Tagworld, and Friendster). Blog properties such as Blogger and Typepad are not yet included in the breakdown. The stats package is free for the first 60 days, and then costs $4 per feed, per month after that.
There’s also a distribution piece in the works that will allow one click adds of a newly configured widget to PageFlakes, Freewebs, Snipperoo, Netvibes, and Weebly.
The MuseStorm widget configuration tool is excellent. In addition to providing a thorough list of formatting options for dimensions, colors, fonts, widget icon, etc., you can also choose from two presentation options – a list based widget, or one that automatically rotates through individual posts from your feed. Here are two examples of the same feed (RateItAll’s list of Best Presidents), with two different MuseStorm configurations.
Each widget comes equipped with a little flashbulb icon in the top right hand corner which when clicked, displays a description of the widget (which you submit during the configuration process). There’s also a prominent “Add to your Website” button at the bottom of every MuseStorm widget that points directly to the MuseStorm configuration tool for the widget. The title of the widget points back to a URL of the site providing the feed.
So why would a publisher want to build their widgets with MuseStorm? I think there are a couple of reasons. First and foremost, the MuseStorm configuration tool allows faster, easier, and probably better widget publishing than what most publishers could do on their own. And of course the quality of the MuseStorm widget configuration tool does not just benefit the original widget publisher – it also benefits any end users who try to grab a widget for their own site.
Also, the fact that MuseStorm widgets are powered by RSS is important. Most sites have already done the work to enable RSS feeds for their site’s content. As opposed to treating widget publishing like a whole new game, MuseStorm makes it an easy, incremental jump to go from RSS feed to Flash widget.
It’s also significant that there’s no onerous MuseStorm branding on the widget. Publishers don’t have to trade brand exposure for easy publishing – through the widget icon and the URL of the title, the brand of the widget publisher is prioritized over MuseStorm’s own brand. The stats package is also an interesting hook, especially once they add blog coverage. I’m not, however, convinced that folks will pay for widget stats. People are used to getting that for free, and there are enough free tools available (Technorati, Yahoo! Site Explorer, etc.) to get a rough idea of how your widget is propagating.
The piece that I’m most excited about as a widget publisher is the distribution aspect. It’s a daunting task to have to build a separate widget for each of the widget aggregators – if MuseStorm can succeed with its goal of one click distribution, that will be a big deal.
MuseStorm’s CEO Ori Soen tells me that there’s an SDK in the works that will allow publishers more flexibility in creating custom widgets. I’m interested to see how this turns out – will it allow customizations like sign-ins and sign-ups within the body of the widget? Will it allow batch publishing of widgets? Could the widget configuration tool be hosted on the publisher’s site?
I see this ability provide customization options as the biggest hurdle for MuseStorm to overcome to become a preferred widget publishing and management tool. One size fits all works up to a point, but as widgets start to become more sophisticated, customization becomes more important.
The other hesitancy that I would have as a publisher in pushing my content out through the MuseStorm widget is the absence of a crawlable link to my site. I don’t care what Jason Calacanis says – SEO is critically important to a large number of start-ups, and having a successful widget without a crawlable backlink means you’re leaving traffic on the table.
I’m very impressed with what MuseStorm has accomplished to date. I’ll be watching closely to see how the distribution tool shapes up, if they can add blogging properties to the analytics tool, and what kind of flexibility is provided by the SDK.
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