Sexy Widget

Minibar London

The start-up scene is alive and well in London.  I had the chance to pitch RateItAll's distributed rating / community widget at Minibar last night, and it was a good time.  There were about 150 or so entrepreneurs there, which was all the more impressive considering that it was a Friday evening before a long weekend.

The other demos were:

MapMyHotel - a service that dynamically maps hotels with a very cool interface

eCourier - a real, offline courier service that is releasing its massive database of courier tracking data to developers to see what cool things people can build with it

OpenStreetMap - a collaborative mapping service that opens up geographical data for anyone to edit

Ymogen / Geostories - a mapping and video mash up used to tell stories.

Blindside - an organization that is aggregating the learnings regarding technology based security threats, and presenting its findings to the British government

Digesting the Facebook News

I'm sitting here trying to digest all of the Facebook news and analysis in order to understand what it really means for widget publishers.  I'm not there yet - I have some questions out to a few folks to get some clarification, but I will post more when I feel like I have a better handle.

So far, the two most interesting things that I've read have both come from Rafe Needleman.   Point 1 is his take about music discovery and recommendation service iLike that is one of Facebook's flagship application partners.

Partovi isn't yet sure what will happen to his original site, iLike.com. I get the impression that he fully expects the Facebook version of the site to quickly outstrip the traffic on the original site, and certainly there's no way iLike.com will be able to approach the community numbers that Facebook has.

I find this as a pretty chilling self-assessment from one of the stronger, better backed destination social networks out there.  iLike has cash, a powerful corporate backer in Ticketmaster, and an incredible product.  Yet they don't see a future as an independent destination site.  This speaks volumes to me.  They see widgets not as a nice marketing tool, but as the reason for them to exist.

Rafe's second point is on how it's the Facebook News Feed that holds all of this stuff together:

A controversial feature when it was introduced in September of 2006, the Facebook News Feed is going to be central to this new open system. It's the glue that binds the new services and their users together on the Facebook network. The feed will alert users when their friends interact with a new f8 service--when they listen to music, rent movies, buy things, and so on. It might lead to feed overload, but Facebook users will soon know a whole lot more about what their friends are up to. It will be like Twitter, but automatic.

One of the reasons I've been slow to jump on the Twitter bandwagon is my belief that implicit services are inherently more participatory than explicit services.  In other words, while Twitter is certainly a fun little app, I was struggling to believe that a service like Twitter that requires you to explicitly publish data, will ever see the participation rates that would make it a game changer.   

Rafe's characterization of the News Feed component of Facebook as an implicit Twitter is dead on.

Sexy Widget Goes to Europe

Starting tonight at midnight, I'm taking advantage of my employer's virtual nature to switch up my home base a little bit.

I'll be working out of London from May 23 through May 30, then out of Barcelona through June 8, then out of London again through June 13.

London is a place that I don't know well enough, and Barcelona is a place that I don't know at all. I'm really looking forward to it.

Drop me a line if anybody wants to talk widgets in either of those places - I'll be attending Minibar in London on Friday.

Widgets and Search

So I’ve been trying to get my head around the recent news that Google is now allowing users to customize their search results with gadgets / widgets.

My initial take was that this meant that users could embed select Google Gadgets into their custom Google Coop search engines.

Google Coop is the service that lets you build your own search engine that defines which sites are included in the results pages.  What I expected to see was the ability to enhance these custom search engines with related Google Gadgets that you could assign to certain queries.

Upon digging into it, I discovered that I had it wrong.  Instead of allowing users to enhance their custom search engines with widgets, they are instead allowing users to enhance their organic search results pages with widgets.

It sort of works like an RSS subscription.  You choose Google Gadgets from publishers that you trust, and when you submit a Google query for which that publisher has a widget (assuming you are logged into Google), you’ll see that widget above your search results.  It’s pretty cool, but perhaps a bit too complicated to grasp and set up for the mainstream user.

But that doesn’t mean that widgets + search doesn’t have legs.  One of the big challenges for organic search is the lag between when a publisher pushes some content live, and when that data shows up in the organic search results.  Search is a three step process; 1) Spidering; 2) Processing; and 3) Indexing.  For all but the biggest sites, seeing your fresh content show up in the organic search results can take days, if not weeks.

Widgets / Gadgets solve this problem because they update dynamically, synched to the publisher.

So Google is already building a huge database of widgets / gadgets, with title and author information.  They also have interaction data such as views and embeds which could be used as a proxy for quality.

It’s not hard to imagine a world where users don’t have to subscribe to a specific Google Gadget.  Instead they could just opt in to widgets in general.  Or perhaps they'd have to opt out of widgets.  In this scenario, Google could serve the highest quality, most relevant widget above any search results page, in the process injecting fresh content for time sensitive queries like sports scores, weather, and stock quotes.

Widgets as a marketing tool.  Widgets as a branding tool.  Widgets as a user acquisition tool.  Widgets as a content generation tool.  Widgets as an advertising platform.  And now, widgets as search results.  Any wonder that guys like David Hornik are bullish on this space?

For more coverage, see Mashable and Steve Rubel.

Google AdSense and Widgets

My employer was the very first site on the Web to syndicate Google AdSense to its community via the AdSense API.  Members who contribute content are able to share in the ad revenue associated with that content via this integration with Google AdSense.

For a long time, I've been been very keen to help our members drop their Adsense Publisher IDs into their user generated widgets.  I felt that this would be an incredible motivator for our members to really get creative in trying to create viral content.  Due to the massive number of pageviews that a popular widget can accumulate, I envisioned scenarios where our content creators could make some real money, and not the $20-30 per month that our top contributors make now.

Unfortunately, Google has yet to give us the green light.  About a month ago, I got the opportunity to talk this vision through with a couple of senior AdSense product managers, and show them exactly the sorts of widgets in which the AdSense Ads would appear.   I had also requested permission on two previous occasions.

To make a long story short, they're just not ready yet.  The sticking point appears to be the lack of control that Google would have in where their network of advertisers would show up.  And on that level, they're absolutely right.  There would be nothing to stop the publisher of nazi child porn site from grabbing a RateItAll widget, and running that widget with its associated AdSense ads on their site.

It's a shame, because in the world of revenue sharing, user generated widgets + Google AdSense would seem to be a killer combination.  If I were one of the also-ran contextual ad networks such as YPN or MSN AdCenter, I would probably try and take this opportunity to rock the boat a little bit.

Anatomy of a Widget

As regular readers of this blog know, my employer recently launched a widget that I’m pretty proud of.  It’s a distributed rating and community widget with full read/write capabilities.  The initial use case for this widget is as a blog feedback and community badge.

I thought it might be useful if I went through each component and view of the widget and explain what everything does, and the thought process behind each.

Get comfortable, as this is a pretty long post.

Purpose / Scope

Any widget that expects to earn real estate on a blog must bring something to the table for the host site.  This read/write widget attempts to do four things for the host site:

1) Provide feedback / consumer ratings functionality.  With this widget, sites can add a slick, sophisticated consumer ratings engine in minutes.

2) Build Community.  This widget provides some simple social media functionality by displaying the icons of recent reviewers, and letting folks scroll through the reviews of others.

3) Drive Traffic.  RateItAll is retooling its destination site to drive maximum traffic to blogs that implement the feedback badge.  A site wide “hottest blogs” module will be launched shortly to RateItAll’s 800K monthly uniques in order to promote the blogs that are driving the most ratings via the widget.  The obvious inspiration for this model is Digg.

4) Build Links.  Any blog that implements the feedback badge gets a targeted, direct link from RateItAll’s blog directory.

In return, we are seeking the following:

1) Review Content and Rating Data.  Reviews published via a widget simultaneously appear on RateItAll.com.  This content is owned by the reviewer and can be removed from the RateItAll network at any time at their discretion.

2) Widget Distribution.  The best way to distribute a widget is in the wild, via the widget itself.

3) Real Estate and Backlinks (more on this to follow)

I intentionally left “drive traffic” off of this list.  As ZDNet notes, this widget is about content generation that can be leveraged by both the host site and RateItAll.  Unlike many of the current generation of widgets, branding is not a primary goal for us either.

I think an important first step for anybody working on their widget strategy is to try and get their brain around the value exchange that will take place when a blogger or profile owner places your widget on their site.  What problem is your widget solving, and what do you expect to get back for solving this problem?  Is it a fair exchange?

Synching Widgets with Home Base

A critical aspect of this widget is the tie in with the RateItAll.com destination community.  Reviews posted via a widget show up simultaneously on RateItAll.com and vice versa.  Registrations captured by the widget automatically register the user with RateItAll.com, and vice versa.

RateItAll.com’s destination community supports our widget strategy in a couple of important ways:

1) It drives traffic back to participating blogs, sites, and profile pages
2) It provides the monetization infrastructure for the content collected via the distributed rating network
3) It provides widget distribution by pushing the rating widgets to the site’s large destination community

As much as I like the idea of a fully distributed, widget powered network that only exists at the edge, I believe that widgets backed by a sturdy home base community have a better chance for success than those that exist solely on a distributed basis.

Heading and Title

The orange icon in the top left of the widget is the RateItAll logo.  We used it here because it’s a subtle way to brand the widget, and the up and down arrows provide a nice visual representation of the action of rating.  We went back and forth as to whether the icon should link back to the home page, and it was only after some testing that we decided to activate this link.  Folks were clicking on the icon and expecting it to go somewhere.  So we linked it.

The scrolling title is one of my favorite aspects of the widget, and its purpose is more functional than cosmetic.  Because this widget will eventually need to represent the more than one million user generated listings on RateItAll, it needs to account for varying character lengths for titles.  The scrolling title was the only way to manage this.

Most of the issues that cropped up around heading and title for us had to do with either trying to predict potential fraud uses and how to deal with the wildly varying character lengths that you have if your widgets are user generated content.

Rating and Review Field

The rating interface and review field is the default view of the widget.  The inspiration of this view was Answerbag’s Q&A widget which I reviewed a while back.  I found the text field inviting, and as this widget’s “write” functionality is its differentiator, we decided that it should be front and center.

Down the road, we will probably let the publisher choose the default view.

The empty stars represent the most visual and real estate conserving way that we could get across the idea of rating.  Users can rate the item by clicking an empty star – if they try to submit a review without a rating, they are prompted to return to this view to submit their rating.

Footer and Nav Buttons

Immediately beneath the review field sits the all-important “Get This Widget” link.  Once we put the widget in open beta, this link will point to the widget configuration tool.  While we toyed with the idea of in widget configuration, we just weren’t able to spec out an acceptable level of user experience within such a small footprint.

For verticals other than blogs (e.g. a feedback badge for Barack Obama that might be relevant to numerous sites), we plan to include a “copy this widget” link instead that generates the code within the body of the widget.  There are a couple of widgets that do a nice job with this functionality including Chipin.

Of course, there is no registration required to grab or copy a widget.

To the right of the “Get This Widget” link sits the “Submit” button.  This particular location on the widget changes depending on the view, and acts as our catch-all location to put functionality that we couldn’t figure out where else to put.  More on this to follow.

The nav buttons provide access to the four primary views of the widget: the Rate It! View, the Community view, the Browse Reviews view, and the About Us view.  Mousing over each of these nav buttons tells the user what it does.

HTML Link

Beneath the body of the widget there’s an HTML link with the structure “Category Name on RateItAll.com” which pulls from RateItAll’s taxonomy.  So the previously mentioned Barack Obama widget would have the text “2008 Presidential Candidates on RateItAll,” and an Elbo Room widget (SF bar) would display “San Francisco Bars on RateItAll.”

This link has two purposes – to provide the user with access to related content, and to support our SEO efforts.

We view these SEO efforts as a win / win for us and the publisher, as traffic will be routed back to participating blogs.  We are intentionally not optimizing for the blog’s name – we chose instead to optimize for the category of that the blog falls under (e.g. optimizing for “Web 2.0 Blogs” as opposed to “Read/WriteWeb.”

Because this link sits outside of the .swf file, it can be easily removed by the publisher.  We’re OK with this.

Login / Join View

When a not signed in user submits a rating / review, they are prompted to join or login.  While putting up a registration barrier is not ideal from a content generation perspective, in the world of credible consumer ratings, there’s no way of getting around it.

The toggle functionality between the join and login fields was modeled off of the excellent Box.net widget.  To date, Box.net is the only widget that I’ve seen to tackle in-widget registration, and I think they do a masterful job.

Logging in to one widget automatically logs you into all RateItAll feedback widgets, and logging out of one logs you out of all.  Widget login/logout is not synched with RateItAll.com login at the moment – we’re trying to figure out the best way to manage this piece by looking at services like MyBlogLog as a model.

Community View

The Community View displays a list of the most recent ten users who have rated the item.  This view was modeled off of the MyBlogLog widget, and clicking on a user’s profile picture takes them to that user’s RateItAll profile, where numerous social media features are provided including messaging, testimonials, friending, and more.

The catch all slot of the Community View houses the logout button.  Clicking this button deletes your Flash cookie, and logs you out of all RateItAll feedback widgets.

Browse Reviews View

The Browse Reviews view represents the “Read” aspect of the widget, and allows end users to scroll through the reviews that have been posted by others.  As time goes on, we expect this view to become a useful way for blog publishers to convert passers by to full time readers / subscribers.  User reviews are one of the web’s most effective tools in driving conversion, and there’s no reason that this shouldn’t apply to blogs as well as products.

Clicking on a review header takes the user to a permalink of the review itself, where the end user can rebut the review, link to it, email it to a friend, or click through to post their own review.

The catch all slot of the Browse Reviews View holds a link to view all reviews that points to the RateItAll hosted listing for the item.

About Us View

This view shows a short snippet which explains what the widget does.  We’re considering swapping this out for an About section on the item being rated.  For example, if we decide to do this, a feedback badge on Read/WriteWeb would show “About RWW” instead of About RateItAll.

Next Steps

Moving forward, we are in the process of trying to address most of Ivan Pope's Ten Sins of Widget Makers, as well as tweak the widget so it works for different verticals.

For more coverage of RateItAll’s distributed rating widget, see Read/WriteWeb, ZDNet’s The Social Web, Stuntdubl, Stefan Juhl, and Stickiwidgets.

To participate in the closed beta of this widget, click HERE.

If you’d like to provide feedback on RateItAll’s Distributed Rating Widget, use the widget below.

List of Widget Sins

Ivan has a nice post up over at Snipperoo on "Ten Sins of the Widgets Makers."

I agree with most of them with the following caveats:

- Sometimes you have to get stuff out before it's perfect
- Sometimes you have to have sacrifice functionality for simplicity

Last.FM Playlists – Best Music Widget Yet

Way back in September, 2006, I wrote a review of the Last.FM music chart widget.  It was only the fourth review that I had written for SexyWidget, and at the time, it was my favorite widget.  As I wrote in my review:

I have not found a widget that I appreciate more than the Last.FM music widget. Its key strengths are its ability to portray something unique about the publisher, the fact that it’s fueled by implicit and not explicit data, and the almost universal desire of folks to share the music that they’re listening to.

But the Last.FM chart widget was not without its weaknesses.  Again, from my same review:

The only possible knock that I can think of about this widget is that it’s a nice to have, not a need to have. It doesn’t provide any additional functionality to a Web page, like the Meebo Me widget, for example. If you fast forward two years to when every online business is pushing a widget of some kind, I can see adoption decisions being made along the lines of required vs. preferred. In this sort of a world, the content based Last.FM widget may lose out to a functionally based widget such IM or a shopping cart. By then however, I would expect the Last.FM widget to evolve to be an actual music player.

Well, a lot has happened since I wrote this review of Last.FM’s widget.  In October of last year, music community iLike introduced a widget that was superior to Last.FM’s music chart widget.  Instead of using a sporadically updating image widget, the iLike widget was made in Flash and updated dynamically.  More importantly, the iLike widget not only captured your implicit music listening history, but it was also a music player that played samples of the tracks. 

It took a little while, but Last.FM has struck back with the best music widget that I have seen to date.  The new Last.FM playlist widget allows members to set up playlists of at least fifteen songs that can be streamed, in their entirety, via a Last.FM widget.  They've also extended their neighbor radio functionality into widgets, and added a recently played widget. 

The only similar service that I have seen to the Last.FM playlist widget is the Streampad music player.  Streampad helps you build playlists consisting of hotlinked MP3 files that Streampad finds in RSS feeds.  As good as Streampad is, it has two significant weaknesses; 1) It seems to operate in a legal grey zone, as it enables single track, on demand streaming; and 2) My playlists are always breaking when MP3 files are taken offline.

Last.FM tries to get around the copyright issues by forcing each playlist to include at least 15 tracks, and shuffling the playlists when played.  Whether or not this approach can hold up to legal scrutiny remains to be seen.

As Last.FM is drawing from their DB of licensed music tracks, I don’t expect them to face Streampad’s problem of tracks being pulled offline.

In addition to serving as a distributed radio stations, the Last.FM playlist widget also extends Last.FM’s affiliate revenue model out to the edge.  Clicking on a track title displays an affiliate link to buy the album at a Last.FM partner.  As I write this article, this feature is not yet working – but it’s clearly built into the widget’s functionality.

I guess what I like most about this widget is that it takes Last.FM’s absolute best functionality – the ability to stream custom radio stations – and extends it to the edge.  With one fell swoop, Last.FM’s large user base has been enlisted as distributed DJs tasked to not only spread the Last.FM brand, but to extend its affiliate reach.

For more coverage on Last.FM’s playlist widget as well as their other new widgets, see Mashable, Widgets Lab and TechCrunch.  You can check out my Playlist in the right hand column.

6 (+2) Essential Elements of a Great Web Widget

Stefan Juhl has a nice post up about the elements of a good web widget.

(I'm not complaining that he used the new RIA read/write blog feedback widget as an example)

Mpire Distributed Shopping Widgets

Disclosure: Mpire is a client of mine

Mpire is a “Price Comparison 2.0” service that provides shopping info and historical pricing information for products across thousands of retailers including big ones like eBay and Amazon.  As opposed to just showing you the price that merchants are offering, Mpire leverages this historical data to show you the price you should be paying, and which way things are trending.

It’s incredibly rich and useful data / content.

As of this morning, Mpire has set this data and their shopping tools free via widgets.  Blogs and shopping sites can now offer sophisticated price comparison and trending tools on their sites for no charge. 

As an added incentive, publishers can plug in their eBay or Amazon affiliate ID’s into the widget and earn 100% of the referral revenue.  Mpire wanted to allow AdSense inclusion as well, but unfortunately, AdSense’s TOS still doesn’t allow this.

The things I really like about this offering are:

- The content.  This is unique, compelling, useful content that will improve conversions and add editorial value.
- The revenue sharing hook.  I like how Mpire leveraged proven, existing revenue programs to let widget publishers make some money.
- The philosophy.  MPire took their absolute best content – their secret sauce so to speak – packaged it up, and is letting it fly.

Click through to check out Mpire’s widgets for yourself.

For more coverage, see John Cook’s Venture Blog, TechCrunch, Widgets Lab, Mashable, Snipperoo, and Social Media Club.