Sexy Widget

Vacation - No Posting Next Week

Guys, I am unplugging next week.  There will be no SW posts until next weekend at the earliest.

RateItAll Partners with MuseStorm to Widgetize 25K Rating Lists

As most of you know, Sexy Widget is not a full time gig for me.  My day job is running a consumer rating site called RateItAll.  The site gets pretty big traffic, and is growing steadily.  Quantcast, using actual traffic data that we supply, ranks us in the top 3,000 US sites.

I believe that one of the secrets to the site’s growth has been our decision to embrace “long tail rating” by allowing our users to create and manage interactive rating lists on just about every topic imaginable.  These lists are often obscure, sometimes entertaining, occasionally useful, and other times, utterly ridiculous.  What we’ve found is that if you aggregate thousands of obscure lists, the aggregated demand for those lists translates into real traffic.

Anyway, we now have about 25K of these lists, of varying quality, usefulness, and entertainment value.  Borrowing a page from Fred Wilson, we’ve decided to microchunk these rating lists (in the form of Flash widgets), and set them free around the Web. 

So the decision that we were faced with was whether to take on this project in house (including design, configuration tool, distribution, analytics), or to outsource it to one of the widget platforms.

The key decision factor for us lay in the RSS feeds that were already being generated by our rating lists.  Because MuseStorm was the first of the widget platforms to launch a public RSS to Flash Widget conversion tool, I was able to get to a comfort level with their platform before even speaking with them about the project.  Conceptually, it was far less daunting to take the incremental step of using our RSS feeds to build out a MuseStorm widget, than it was to start the whole thing from scratch.

Then there was the issue of cash flow.  We structured our agreement with MuseStorm on a CPM basis, with a small monthly minimum spend.  Because RateItAll is a bootstrapped company, it’s a big deal not to have to shell out thousands up front in development costs for a project like this.  As an added bonus, MuseStorm’s designer worked with us to come up with a distinct look & feel for our widgets, which saved us cash on the design as well.

Anyway, now it’s live.  MuseStorm’s widget configuration tool is hooked up to every one of our rating lists.  We have custom designs available to our site visitors, and have access to fairly robust analytics about where these widgets are ending up and how often they are being viewed.

In addition to being able to grab lists that are already on the site, anybody who wants to can now create an interactive rating list using RateItAll's free tool, and immediately generate a slick Flash widget.

We’re hopeful that the syndication potential of some of these lists combined with our revenue sharing program might actually make some of our users some good money.

If you’d like to see a few examples of MuseStorm / RateItAll lists, you can check out the RateItAll Blog.

If you’d like to browse some lists and grab one for yourself, check out our list tag cloud.

Here’s a link to the press release.

 

Check out RateItAll

Distributed Social Media – Adaptive Blue

 

Widgets and browsers, browsers and widgets. Both represent means for a service to go beyond the boundaries of its domain and become distributed.

StumbleUpon has been very successful in riding its browser extension to a large user base. Services like YouTube and Quizilla have been able to get big distribution for their content by way of widgets. A few days ago, MikeD from OthersOnline explained to Sexy Widget readers how inputs from the toolbar and the widgets combine to properly tag your OthersOnline profile. 

Adaptive Blue is also trying to build a service in which its widgets and its browser extension work together. Rather than treat widgets and toolbar extensions as different features with different functions, Adaptive Blue pairs a browser extension (input) with widgets (output) to create a superior browsing and sharing experience. 

Before getting into how Adaptive Blue’s widget works, it makes sense to first spend a little time on what Adaptive Blue is trying to do as a company. To better understand what Adaptive Blue does, take a look at how Union Square Ventures' Brad Burnham describes the features offered by Amazon: 

“When you are looking at a movie on Amazon, they can show you every movie by that director. They can show you movies that are in the same genre. They can even show you movies that have nothing in common with the movie you are looking at except that people who liked that movie also liked these other movies, a surprisingly useful trick called collaborative filtering. Amazon can do a bunch of other things that make your life easier on the web because they know you.”

The other reason that Amazon can provide this functionality is because they control the environment. They set the rules for how the database is structured, and how things are tagged.

Adaptive Blue is trying to offer this same richness of browsing experience, but on a distributed basis across domains, not just for movies, and without control of the environment. In other words, they are trying to pull semantic meaning out of the existing structure of web pages, while also giving their users the tools to build out Meta data for the best pages and products on the Web.

So here’s how the service works. Once you’ve downloaded the browser extension, right-clicking on any page will pull up a menu of actionable links. For example, right clicking on the “Shawshank Redemption” page of IMDB gives me a Blue Menu that shows me where to find more info, where to buy the movie, where to rent it, movies by the same director, actor pages, etc.

 

The other important piece of Adaptive Blue is the bookmarking functionality. As you find Web pages, or books, or movies, or wine, or blogs that interest you, you can “Blue Mark” the page. Adaptive Blue seems to do a very good job of figuring out if you’re trying to save a page, a blog, a book, a movie, etc, and providing you with the appropriate form. Saving an item gives you the option of rating, tagging, and describing the thing you saved.

So how do the widgets tie into this? They’re the sharing component. As you save and tag items, you can share this information via a widget called a Blue Badge. You can check out my Blue Badge in the right sidebar, with a list of my blog Blue Marks. There are also mini widgets that you can build called Blue Links that display a link to the saved page with the service’s related link resources built in. 

It’s important to note that this service is entirely distributed. There are no Adaptive Blue profiles, and there is no social network lurking behind the scenes as there is on StumbleUpon.  If you’re going to share what you find, it’s going to be through widgets on your sites. Adaptive Blue is not under the same pressure as widget dependent distributed services to tie things back to a home base, primarily because they can monetize in the browser via affiliate links. From a business model perspective, this is a big deal. 

Despite how neat this service is, the obstacles facing Adaptive Blue are significant. It’s not the easiest concept in the world to grasp. There’s a download involved. It’s a new way of surfing the web, and a new behavior for consumers to learn. All the new terminology (BlueLinks, BlueOrganizer, BlueBadge) gets a little confusing. 

To be successful, Adaptive Blue is going to need to drive downloads. The downloads provide the user experience and provide the tools for each user to add Meta data that, in the aggregate, will make the service even better. The reason that Adaptive Blue’s widget is such an important piece of this equation is that it lets Adaptive Blue’s user base push the downloads. The complexity and uniqueness of this service are such that its value is going to be difficult to communicate in a short sound byte, whether it’s through a distribution partner or via an advertisement. My sense is that Adaptive Blue is going to have to follow a Tivo type adoption curve where a fanatical user base of early adopters spreads the good word. How will they spread the good word? Through the Blue Badge widgets.

For more on Adaptive Blue, see A VC, the Union Square Ventures Blog, and TechCrunch.

 

 

 

Adage Widget Article

There's a nice little article on widget trends in Advertising Age.  Sexy Widget gets some props.  Here's a quote that hints that there's still a lot of widget growth to come:

"There's a lot of promise, but we're still in the early stages of marketers using them," said David Berkowitz, director of emerging media at search-focused agency 360i. His research recently found just 8% of the top network- and cable-TV programmers use emerging media such as widgets in their media-marketing efforts.

Widget Platform Space is Getting Crowded

Way back in the beginning of October last year, I wrote a purely speculative post about how Feedburner would be a logical entrant into the widget platform space.  It's now clear that they are going to try and apply their feed management system to widgets as well.

Netvibes has recently announced a universal widget.  Today, Pete posts over at Mashable about how YourMinis is introducing "blog widgets that go head to head with Widgetbox Blidgets."

Meanwhile, some pretty heavy hitters are chiming in on what the potential business models for widget aggregators might look like.

To say things are percolating right now would be an understatement.

My only question is when Google is going to roll in with a service that combines Google Gadgets + Google Analytics + Google AdSense.  Anybody care to speculate? 

Distributed Social Networks – OthersOnline

I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of people tagging.  I remember how excited I was when somebody first showed me the Facebook feature where clicking on a people tag displayed a list of other people with the same tag.

Up until now, the only service that I’d seen built primarily around people tagging was a site called Tagalag, which allows you to tag acquaintances with keywords, thereby helping to build a Meta layer of people connections.  Sadly, Tagalag never got traction, though it does have improbably impressive search engine clout (for my name anyway).

Enter OthersOnline.  OthersOnline is a distributed service that promises to drive targeted traffic to your blog or site based on keywords that you select yourself via your OthersOnline profile.  It appears that eventually the service is going to get into the people search business, but this aspect is not live yet.

The service is executed in two different ways – via a toolbar, and via a widget. 

The toolbar acts as the profile / person / site discovery tool, pushing relevant OthersOnline profiles to you as you browse the Web.  Built into the toolbar is the ability to chat or email with other users without disclosing your personal information.  There are also contextual ads served by Kaboodle that show up in the toolbar’s dropdown profile display.

The widget displays the OthersOnline profiles that have been tagged with your keyword, and serves as a new user acquisition tool for the service with its invitation of “Tag Yourself.  Be Found.”  There’s also a friending type feature called “favorites” that allows you to add other OthersOnline users for easy access to them from your toolbar.

As you can see in the right sidebar, I tagged my profile with the word “widgets.”  The OthersOnline widget is showing my profile and that of Ivan from Snipperoo.  One interesting thing to note is that although I have tagged myself with a variety of words (burritos, basketball, San Francisco, etc.), the only word that’s triggering related profiles is “widgets.”  This must be because of the content of Sexy Widget, though I’m not sure how the service is drawing that connection.

There are a couple of things that I like about OthersOnline.  It’s able to pack a lot of information in a small footprint by using what they call a “fly-out window” that’s triggered when you mouse over a thumbnail in the widget (unfortunately this fly-out window disappears under Sexy Widget’s middle column, but I’m sure they’ll get this sorted out soon).  Clicking on a user’s URL takes you right to the site, and does not bring you to an OthersOnline profile.  I also like how the service uses both a toolbar and a widget as a means to achieve a distributed presence.  Widgets alone are not the only way to achieve distribution – just ask StumbleUpon.

In other posts, I’ve talked about the importance of having a value proposition in order to earn sidebar real estate.  While the value proposition of the OthersOnline service seems simple enough – tag yourself and drive relevant traffic to your various websites – it’s not as clear to me why I should add the actual widget to my site.  Referrals are triggered by the existence of an OthersOnline profile, not by the existence of the widget.  For example, Ivan is showing up as a related profile on my sidebar, yet he has no widget on his site.  This disconnect between the widget and the service’s core value proposition may slow widget adoption.

So if the Explode widget’s value is to show the blog owner’s friends, and the ShowYourself and Wink widgets’ value is to aggregate profile links, what exactly is in it for me to put the OthersOnline widget on my site?  I guess it’s a marginally nice service for Sexy Widget readers to show the sites of folks with similar interests.  I’m just not sure if that’s enough – especially in the early days when there aren’t that many users.  For this type of value prop, it would appear that the Criteo auto-roll might be a better fit.

It looks to me that OthersOnline is on a collision course with Wink, with both in a race to accumulate user profiles complete with Meta data so that they can offer a people search service.  Wink is a little further along in terms of offering the destination site piece of the puzzle, while OthersOnline has a toolbar up and running ahead of Wink.  The real differentiator that I see so far is Wink’s use of landing pages to generate organic search referrals.

After playing with this neat service for a while, I’m left wondering where the users are going to come from.  Having a toolbar centric service slows down the rate of adoption, and as powerful as toolbars are in providing a distributed user experience, they don’t do much for you in terms of enabling viral adoption.  The widgets are neat, but as of yet, aren’t solving any big problem for my blog.

It’s still very early in the game, and OthersOnline is rolling out new stuff very quickly.  No doubt they are working hard on how to solve the user acquisition challenge.

For more on OthersOnline see TechCrunch. 

 

New MyBlogLog Feature?

I just noticed that when I scrolled my cursor over the photos of the MyBlogLog panel on my site, a little orange "x" appeared with the text "Click to hide this person from your site."

What an excellent idea.

Nothing against profiles named "Mortgage Reseller" that show lots of cleavage, but if you want to advertise on SexyWidget, you should have to pay for it.

Three March Madness Widgets

Courtesy of CBS / Clearspring (Check out the neat MySpace add tool... it works!):

Courtesy of Spring Widgets (by way of Widgets Lab):

Get this widget!

Courtesy of RateItAll / MuseStorm:

Check out RateItAll

ShowYourself – a Distributed Something or Other

ShowYourself is a very simple tool that lets you display a list of your profile urls in a customizable widget.

When I say simple, I’m not exaggerating.  There’s no registration required, there seems to be only one page on the whole site, there are no ShowYourself profiles, and the process is as simple as going down a checklist of social media sites and plugging in your various user ID’s.

This service is 100% distributed.  Once you’ve set up your widget, there’s no reason to ever go back to ShowYourself, unless you want to add / delete profiles.  I can’t call it a distributed social network, because there’s nothing networked or social about it.  It doesn’t capture relationships among users, and doesn’t offer any social media tools like comments or messaging.

It’s a handy little tool, but in no way is ShowYourself a threat to services like Wink.  Without a home base, there are no monetization prospects, and there’s really not much to it beyond a formatted list of URLs.  If anything, this looks like a cool little side project of high school student Dustin Bachrach.

That being said, I think a tool like this would be a welcome feature as part of an existing social network.  I’d love to have something as simple as this available to me when setting up a profile on a social media site.

For more on ShowYourself, see WidgetsLab, StickiWidgets, and Mashable.

Distributed Social Networks – Explode

Explode is a distributed network play owned by the folks who market Elgg.org, an open source social networking platform.  The Explode widget is a way for (primarily) blog owners to display friends from around the Web, regardless of what communities they belong to.  The widget also allows for public commenting (by Explode members).  Explode does offer an image based version of their widget that will work on MySpace, but it’s not nearly as interesting as the JavaScript version, and would seem to be unlikely to get much traction.  Blogs would seem to be Explode's target market.

For a distributed social network to take off, it needs to provide a compelling reason for blog owners to give up some sidebar real estate.  In the case of MyBlogLog, the value prop is pretty clear – it “turns the lights on” so folks can see who’s in the room.

Wink takes a different tack.  As opposed to providing info about a blog’s readers, it provides additional info about the blog’s author in the form of aggregated profile links.

So what’s the value proposition for Explode?  It displays relationships between the blog owner and others that, in theory, cut across all other communities.  Is this, along with the commenting functionality offered by the widget, enough to earn Explode some real estate?  I’m not really sure.  Obviously, “friending” is a huge deal in the social network space.  Most of us in the industry agree that it would be neat to have networks of friends that span across various communities.

However, in some ways it seems that pure, unstructured friending may be on the way out.  Most of the self-selecting network tools that we’re now seeing have some purpose – whether they collect data for a recommendation engine, or act as a filter.  So far at least, Explode does neither.

One aspect of Explode that I find fascinating is how they structure their widget links.  Clicking on the image of one of the people in my Explode network will take you not to their Explode profile (like MyBlogLog), but directly to the person’s blog or site.  I love this.  It really does have the potential to be a true distributed network, with just a small tie back (through comments and registrations) to the Explode home base.  Even the friending can happen through the body of the widget (for registered users).  This dedication to being truly distributed is especially impressive given that Explode is sitting on a ton of social media features by virtue of its Elgg roots.  The temptation must have been there to drive everything back to their platform.

If Explode were to get some traction, I think that it would be a really neat way to bounce around the Web.  Explode widgets would let you follow the trail of human relationships, and see the blogs behind each person.  It would be almost like a blog roll populated by humans.

However, my gut reaction is that in order to for Explode to get some traction, they will need to figure out how to give a little bit more to the blog owner.  They certainly have the social media tools at their disposal to try some different things.

For more on Explode, see Ivan and TechCrunch.