The widget platforms continue to innovate.
Widgetbox just made two announcements, timed with the Web 2.0 Expo conference here in San Francisco.
First, they announced Partner Showcases. Partner Showcases are just what they sound like – centralized landing pages that display all of a given company’s widgets in an attractive format. These Partner showcases can be hosted on Widgetbox and/or the publisher’s site.
This doesn’t sound like a particularly big deal – especially as Widgetbox was already offering very basic widget developer landing pages that showed all of the widgets from a given developer.
However, from a publisher perspective, it’s actually pretty useful. The company that I work for has been rolling out new widgets pretty steadily, and is just about to tackle creating a core landing page that displays and explains each of our core widgets. I can definitely see how a slick, intuitive page that has been put together by Widgetbox’s world class UI team could make this task a lot easier.
Here’s an example of the old developer landing page, and here’s an example of a branded Partner Showcase.
The second announcement from Widgetbox is less presentation, and more substance. Widgetbox has added a very slick “in the wild” widget distribution toolkit. Specifically, a prominent “Get It Now” button on every Widgetbox widget triggers a tool that lets end users add (without copying and pasting code) an exact copy of that widget to any of the following sites: MySpace, Blogger, TypePad, Netvibes, PageFlakes, and Google. There are also options to grab the code, or tweak the formatting of the widget.
The tool worked flawlessly for MySpace, TypePad, Netvibes, and Google. It didn’t work for Blogger – I’m pretty sure because I’m still using the “old” blogger format, and I didn’t try PageFlakes. One minor point that I found very clever – after adding the widget to one of my properties, the tool didn’t just close. It sent me back to the distribution menu, encouraging me to add the widget to another property. Very nice.
If you'd like to try it out, the Star Wars widget on the very bottom of SW's left hand sidebar has a "Get It Now" link.
In my opinion, Widgetbox has the best centralized widget directory on the market. With the enhancements made to their “In The Wild” distribution tools, they are pretty darn close to being best in class there as well. (Clearspring’s in-widget distribution tools are also impressive).
Nice work guys.