Sexy Widget

Adaptive Blue Launches New Display Widgets

Smart browsing company Adaptive Blue just launched a few new widgets to complement their existing distributed tools.

The newest round of widgets leverage RSS feeds from popular services such as Amazon and Epicurious to display dynamically updated lists of popular items like Amazon products or Netflix most popular.  You can also set up more personalized widgets of your Amazon wishlist or Netflix Queue.

While these are nice looking widgets, there’s nothing too revolutionary in the widget itself.  Folks have long been able to plug RSS feeds into services like Widgetbox or Musestorm to create their own display widgets of whatever dynamic content might complement their blog.

Dig a little deeper, however, and you can see what Adapative Blue is up to here.  These display widgets are a slick delivery vehicle for their SmartLinks.  Each widget comes equipped with a button corresponding to each item (e.g. a movie title), which triggers Adaptive Blue’s signature SmartLinks module which points to resources around the Web related to that particular item.  The resources might include the movie’s Wikipedia page, its review pages on the New York Times and Flixster, and places to buy the DVD.

The default setting on these widgets allow for Adaptive Blue to earn affiliate fees from purchases driven by their Smartlinks.  However, widget publishers are able to override these default settings and plug in their own Amazon Associate IDs and earn 100% of the resulting affiliate commissions.

While I believe the days when simple display widgets could drive massive distribution to be far behind us, there’s no reason for Adaptive Blue not to experiment with different ways to push out its Smart Links.

I believe Adaptive Blue's biggest challenge as a company is that they are pushing a new behavior that may not be easily grasped by non geeks.  The more things that they can do to wrap their service in simple, understandable contexts, the better.  These sorts of widgets are a nice step in that direction.

Click through to grab your own Popular SmartLink widget. 

(and Gigya or Clearspring if you’re reading this, why not reach out to Adaptive Blue and help them with their one click add buttons)

Some Facebook Nuggets from Snap Summit

I attended Snap Summit last Friday.  It was a nice event attended by a lot of the usual FB suspects - Dave McClure, Jia Shen, Hungry Machine, Peanut Labs, Lookery, Social Media, FB Platform rep, etc.

Here are some of the things I jotted down, in no particular order:

• A lot can be learned by tracking the first ten clicks once someone enters an app
• Uninstall is a trailing indicator - by the time it gets to that point, other stats should have told you it was coming
• App developers are paying too much attention to notifications and invitations, and not enough to the news feed and the profile (Dave McClure)
• Experiment with images in news feed - you can insert up to four
• The performance bottleneck with Facebook Apps is almost always the database
• Google has lost gadget developer attention to the Facebook Platform
• The only way to make real money on Facebook is to go directly to the brands - networks are not going to get it done (Nick)
• Get multiple apps out quick, and ride your horses / high performers
• Flixster had 8 days notice pre platform launch to pull something together - general strategy has been to migrate proven features from Flixster.com to FB
• One of the things that separates professional apps from hobby apps is the focus on analytics and iteration

Yelp Founders at the Commonwealth Club

I went to see Yelp Founders Jeremy Stoppelman and Russell Simmons speak about Yelp at the Commonwealth Club last week.  These guys have been very selective about public speaking engagements, so it was a rare opportunity.

Although my company competes in the margins with Yelp (we have a local business review channel), I'm a huge fan of the company.  I know from personal experience how hard it is to hit the right recipe for online community - and these guys have nailed it, and in the process, have created a very useful service.

One of the big topics of conversation was the question of how Yelp has thrived, when a number of other well funded, local business review companies have failed or given up (Judy's Book, Insider Pages, Zipingo).  Russell Simmons pointed out two things that he thought Yelp had done better than its competitors:

- Emphasize community tools
- Nail one market (San Francisco), and expand out from there

I would agree with these two points (although I do think that a horizontal review play can win in this space), and add a third.  An important aspect of Yelp's execution has been its ability to build an offline presence through local parties.  These parties have served to reinforce the company's image (hip, fun, trendy), and to build real life relationships between the site's reviewers, making the online community stronger.  I also admire how Yelp has pushed out stickers to local businesses - which again, provides that online / offline link.

The night also had a little bit of controversy which I accidentally was involved in.

I learned about the event (about 15 mins before it started) through a twitter (on Facebook) from Xavier Vespa - a guy who had interviewed me a while back for his blog Hyve Up.  I pulled Xavier's cell phone of his profile, and texted him to ask him where the event was, and to say I was going to try and go.  I got there late, and Xavier didn't see me walk in.

The session ended with a discussion of how all the other local business review start ups were dead, and opened up to Q&A.  Xavier got up to the mic and said "This question is from Lawrence Coburn of RateItAll... do you know who RateItAll is?  Jeremy said yes.  "Do you mind if a video tape this answer?" asked Xavier.  "No I don't mind," said Jeremy.

Meanwhile, I'm sitting in my chair thinking wtf... I've met Xavier exactly twice, and I certainly didn't put him up to asking any questions on my behalf.  This was sounding awfully confrontational.

Xavier then asked a perfectly fair (and interesting) question about Yelp's widget and app related plans, and if they were prioritizing apps or widgets.  I learned later that Xavier had known I wanted to come, and thought it would be cool to have a video tape for Sexy Widget of the Yelp founders talking about widgets and apps.

Anyway, I immediately texted Xavier with something pissed off like "I don't like anybody putting words in my mouth."   He explained to me what he was trying to do, and apologized.  I accepted his apology, as it was clear that he had asked his question with good intentions.   I later apologized to Jeremy, who was very gracious.

Here's the video of the actual question and answer.

Clearspring Modularizes - Goes after Gigya

Few have written as eloquently as Clearspring founder Hooman Radfar about the modularization and fragmentation of web content (see here, here, and here).  Hooman’s vision for how things would play out led him to found Clearspring, based on the belief that companies would need help widgetizing, distributing, and tracking their content in this fragmented environment.

Ironically, to date, Clearspring’s widget platform has not itself been modularized.  Part of the reason for this is that Clearspring cut its teeth working with giant media companies such as the NBA, who were looking for a widget service provider that could provide a turnkey solution that encompassed everything – widget hosting and delivery, distribution, and analytics.  While Clearspring’s end to end solution proved to be a great advantage in signing up big media companies, which in turn has propelled it to extraordinary scale, it was less effective in reaching the developer community. 

With the release of Launchpad, Clearspring has begun the process of decoupling its tools from each other, allowing developers to go in on a self serve basis and grab what they need from Clearspring’s suite of products.  Specifically, publishers are now able to add skinnable one click add buttons and for all of their widgetized content, on their site, in minutes.  You also get access to Clearspring’s sophisticated analytics tools.

Those that follow this space closely might be thinking that sounds very much like what Gigya is doing. 

I concur.  I don’t think it would be a stretch to gauge the intent of this release as that of “Gigya Killer.”

As a publisher, I’ve always admired Clearspring’s sleek distribution and analytics tools.  However, because widget distribution from my site has always been important, I never could justify investing the time to plug our widgets into the Clearspring platform without being able to use the same distribution tools from our destination site.  Now that I can plug Clearspring’s platform into our widgets (a subtle but important difference), it’s much easier to see how my company might work with them.

For more coverage, see Mashable.  Click through to try out Clearspring Launchpad yourself.

Looking for Feedback on a Facebook App

My employer has just rolled out an early version of its Consumer Review app for Facebook.  I would appreciate any feedback from Sexy Widget readers - you can email feedback to me, post it on the FB app page, or leave it in the comments.

Thanks a lot.

Just to muddle the nomenclature a little more...

.... Friendster has announced a platform that will enable outside developers to build applications with access to Friendster's social graph.

They're calling these applications...

(wait for it)

...Widgets.

All joking aside, a newly exposed property of 50M users is nothing to scoff at.

UK Widget Conference

Ivan Pope, one of the more credible and respected voices in the world of widget publishing and strategy, is hosting a widget conference in the UK on December 6.

The conference, called Widgety Goodness, has already lined up an all-star cast of speakers.

Here's the discount code for Sexy Widget readers.

A/B Widget Testing with Gigya

A crucial part of distributing a widget or app is constant iteration.  Seeing what works, and what doesn't, and tweaking and re-tweaking your widget / app in order to push up its viral multiple.

Widget platform and ad network Gigya recently released a Flash in widget tracking system that allows developers to measure how users interact with their widget.

From their press release:

With just a few lines of code, a developer can set the Gigya component to measure actions such as when a user starts playing a movie, pauses it or gets to the end of a clip. Because each widget is so unique, Gigya lets developers choose their own names for actions so they make sense when tracking any type of widget, be it a game, music player or slideshow.

While I haven't had time to play around with this yet, conceptually it makes a lot of sense.  When you tweak a widget - whether it be changing a button's color, or the layout, or the design - it's important to be able to measure the impact of those tweaks against desired outcomes.  This tool sounds like it will do exactly that.

Facebook Wants to Own App Stats

Facebook is preemptively rolling out cool app stats for app developers, sending a clear message that it's not willing to let a third party run away with app tracking.  Inside Facebook has the scoop.

Plaxo Keeps Pounding the Openness Drum

A few days ago, I wrote about Plaxo's universal news feed, and how Plaxo was positioning itself in direct contrast to Facebook by pulling in news feed items from around the web, and making an RSS feed of that news feed available to their members.

Now Plaxo has taken the next step and introduced a JavaScript widget that Plaxo members can use to display a summary of their web activity on their own sites.  The widget displays things like blog posts, Dugg articles, Flickr photos, Yelp reviews, and anything else for which there is an RSS feed available.

I would have liked to see some more formatting options for the widget, but I appreciate their desire to get stuff out the door to keep momentum going - especially as they just got a nice mention in the Economist.

For more, see TechCrunch.