Sexy Widget

Check out our Plaxo Pulse Integration

You can now include your RateItAll reviews into your Plaxo Pulse newsfeed.

FIrst, choose the RateItAlll icon from the selection of feeds:

Then enter your RateItAll nickname.

And this is what the output looks like.

Very cool, and thanks to Joseph Smarr for helping to make this happen.

WidgetWebExpo

I just bought my plane tickets for WidgetWebExpo in NYC in June.

I'm going to be speaking about Hub & Spoke / Cross Domain Strategy.

Hopefully I'll catch up with a bunch of you folks there.

Sprout is Cranking

So yesterday Mathew (RateItAll's CTO) and I were cruising around San Francisco looking at offices.  One of the offices that we're looking at is on 22nd and Mission, which is a mildly sketchy part of town - I can say this, as it's also my favorite part of town, and I live there.

The sketchiness is still a bit concerning, however, as I wouldn't want to put up any obstacles that might prevent talented folks from joining our team.

I had heard that widget maker Sprout was sharing offices on the fifth floor of the building, so Mathew and I decided to drop in on them and ask about the building.

We didn't know exactly where they were, but fortunately we ran into a nice young woman on the way up to the fifth floor who was with the company that was sharing the space with Sprout.

"Sprout?" she said.  "Yeah, we share offices with them.... they're so busy!!!"

Talk about a wonderful impression to be leaving on folks who share an office with you.

And true to her assessment, we walked in unannounced and Sprout was in fact cranking.  Heads down over huge monitors, folks lined up shoulder to shoulder in a cool open space.  These folks were in lockdown mode on whatever it is they were working on.

Carnet from Sprout said a few glowing things about the building and neighborhood, and that was it - we left and let the Sprout folks get back to work.

I love seeing small teams just getting after it, and the Sprout folks made quite an impression on me.

Catching up with Watercooler: The Biggest Web App You’ve Never Heard Of

Unless you closely follow the Facebook economy, you’ve probably never heard of Watercooler.  Watercooler bills itself as the world’s largest TV and sports community.  Its community is spread across multiple SNS platforms (Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, Friendster), and across thousands of individual apps.  Unlike its rival Mesmo.TV, Watercooler has chosen to break each interest group (sports team, tv show, etc.), into its own app.

For now, Watercooler exists solely as distributed apps.  But according to founder Kevin Chou, a destination site is in the works so that they can join the Hub & Spoke club.

Since its launch in 2007, Watercooler has amassed 20M users who have installed their various apps.  Monthly pageviews are in the hundreds of millions.

So how have they done it?  Well it certainly hasn’t been through paid promotion.  Kevin Chou says that they have spent about $6500 in app promotion during the life of the company.

Watercooler’s approach has been to focus on building content creation tools (as opposed to creating or licensing content), and mastering the social aspects of how discussion happens around sports and TV programming.  100% of Watercooler’s content is created by its users.  Polls and quizzes are created, photos are uploaded, things are rated, blog posts are published, etc. – all around an area of interest such as a sports team or a TV show.

As readers of this blog know, I am a big fan of cross domain web apps (see my posts here, here, and here).  Watercooler is all over this aspect.  If I create a piece of content via one of the Facebook Watercooler apps (e.g. a poll or a blog post), the content immediately becomes available on the corresponding MySpace Watercooler app.  If I comment on a piece of content on a Facebook Watercooler App, a MySpace Watercooler profile is created for me so that my voice is represented on MySpace as well.

It’s a single, unified, cross domain, user experience, fueled entirely by volunteer created content and participation.

But wait, it gets better.

With so much content being created, the moderation tasks associated with these apps could quickly get out of hand.  Watercooler manages this potential spam issue entirely via volunteer moderators, whom they recognize on the corresponding app, and to whom they provide tools to flag content.

Users creating interactive content, users participating on that user created content, users sharing the content, and users moderating the content.  And the content is not confined to a single domain.

So what, you ask, do the paid staff at Watercooler do?  They build tools (half their team are devs), manage the volunteer community moderators, and focus on monetization.

Watercooler claims a three pronged monetization strategy consisting of 1) advertising; 2) media partnerships (say, delivering video content); and 3) transactional (selling tickets).  The big pitch on the advertising side is to be able to reach targeted users across all the major Social Networking platforms.

To me, the most powerful thing about the platform economy is the unprecedented cost efficiency of user and content acquisition.  Watercooler appears to have found a nice formula for enabling both.

Watercooler is based out of Silicon Valley.

An Offline Widget?

I was walking around the exhibition floor at Web 2.0 Expo and I saw this at the Yahoo! booth - a paper badge advertising that they had been one of the winners of the Webware 100.  I didn't see a Webware booth, but they certainly had a distributed presence.

More on the Cross Domain Opportunity

I’ve been thinking and writing (here, here) a lot recently about the promise of cross domain functionality. 

For the first time, web apps can aspire to be more than just destination websites.  Embedded Flash widgets and viral “poking” apps have given us a taste of how content can spread on its own from page to page.

But I see this sort of “viral for the sake of viral” as small beans compared to the larger prize enabled by an API / Platform driven Web.  What’s more interesting to me is the idea of owning a feature that provides cross domain value to its users.  A successful cross domain feature will allow content contributed on one domain (say Facebook) to available to the contributor on another domain (say MySpace).  A single login will give the user access to that feature’s functionality and content wherever the service is available – blogs, social networks, API partners, etc.

Shelfari (on just $1M in funding), is doing a pretty good job of preserving a unified experience in the books vertical.  If I add a book to my shelf on Shelfari.com, it shows up on my MySpace and Facebook Shelfari applications.   

Disqus, a company that I reviewed here, is also attempting to own a cross domain feature – blog commenting.  If I receive a quality point on a comment that I made on A VC, that reputation point gets associated with my Disqus account wherever I choose to comment.

My own company, RateItAll, is attempting to own the feature of consumer reviews across domains.

In addition to things like making reviews that you post on Facebook available and shareable on MySpace and vice versa, we are also preserving reviewer reputation across domains, and allowing a single login / cookie to enable participation on RateItAll.com, on any blog that uses our widget, on SNS, and on any site using our API.  As a very simple example, if you add our Facebook app, you will be able to post a review of Sexy Widget via the rating widget in the top left hand corner of this blog without logging in, and that review will be accessible on your Facebook account. 

We’ve also just turned on some cross domain functionality between MySpace and Facebook that we think is pretty cutting edge.

Here’s how it works:

RateItAll’s Compatibility Application (FB, MS) allows user to check their compatibility with their friends by rating items within various categories; beer, Web 2.0, politics, TV, movies, etc.  For example, I rate ten beers, you rate ten beers, and we crank out a “beer compatibility score.”  Our compatibility tests are drawn from user submissions to RateItAll’s large destination Web site.

Once a user completes a compatibility test, not only are they displayed their compatibility scores with their friends, but also “global” compatibility scores – the user’s compatibility with people who are not currently their friends.

And here’s where it gets interesting – your global compatibility results on the Facebook App include not only other users on Facebook, but users on MySpace as well.  So by taking a compatibility test on Facebook, you can find people on MySpace that share your tastes.  For example, in this screenshot, all of the links in the "Global Results" section are links to MySpace profiles:

 

We think it’s a pretty cool example of a single user experience that spans multiple domains.  In this particular case, we are proving people discovery of folks with similar interests from a pool that includes both MySpace AND Facebook.

Furthermore, any compatibility tests that you complete on Facebook will also be available to you on MySpace.  Any ratings and reviews that you post on Facebook, MySpace, RateItAll.com, or any of our read / write rating widgets will be available to you for sharing via any of our apps or our destination site.

Oh yeah, you can also access our entire database of millions of reviews on either Facebook or MySpace.

One login, powering consumer ratings for everything, on any domain, with people and content discovery tools that span domains.

Make sense?

If any SW readers have a few minutes and would like to try out our cross domain functionality, you can do so via any of these entry points:

Here’s our Facebook App:

http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=18480724104&b

Here’s our MySpace App:

http://www.myspace.com/rateitallreviews

And here’s the “hub” of the network, RateItAll.com.

Until recently, it was seen as a snub if somebody called your company "a feature."  I don't think it's so much of a snub if you can grow to become a feature for a significant portion of the web.

Four Things Not To Do When Pitching Sexy Widget

In light of these two mildly patronizing and unintentionally amusing posts from RWW and Mashable, I thought it might be important to note some worst practices in pitching a story to Sexy Widget:

1) Insult my mother.  I love my mother, and folks who insult her will not usually get their story published.

2) Steal my cellphone.

3) Tell me that widgets suck.  I don’t want to hear it.

4) Punch me in the eye while pitching a story.  Sadly, this happens more than you would think.

Other than that, you’re good.

Rock on entrepreneurs – don’t let these uppity bloggers get you down.

Distributed Commerce with Cartfly

One of the areas that I expect to explode in the next 12 to 18 months is distributed commerce.

One of the earliest players in this space is Cartfly – a start-up out of Phoenix, that is attempting to enable individuals and small businesses to leverage the social web to drive sales.

The user flow goes something like this: you set up your store on Cartfly.com and populate your store with products.  For each product, you can upload an image, write a description, and specify attributes like sizes available.

You are then provided embed code that you can drop into the site of your choice.  Any embedded store can be grabbed right from the widget without visiting Cartfly.com, and new products that you add to your store via your Cartfly control panel immediately show up anywhere your store has been embedded. 

This is “write once, publish many” applied to ecommerce.

The process to set up a store is painless, aided greatly be a gorgeous, clean design.  A look at Cartfly’s management team will show you that they are loading up on folks who cut their chops at widget powerhouses such as Clearspring and Photobucket.

From a buyer perspective, you are able to interact with a product and seller via the embedded store by viewing a large photo, viewing a product description, and checking the seller’s reputation.  Wisely, Cartfly doesn’t attempt to create yet another seller reputation system – they instead show existing profiles associated with the seller’s email from existing services such as Rapleaf, Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, and more.  Buyers can also “add to cart” via the widget.

The one thing that buyers can’t do from the embedded store is actually purchase the product – for this, you click through to the seller’s hosted store on Cartfly.com.

Cartfly makes money by taking a 3% cut of the transaction, and transactions are powered by PayPal.

Cartfly is a slick and professional effort.  The only gaps that I noticed in the system were the lack of integration of sophisticated sharing tools such as those provided by services like Clearspring and Gigya.  Manually embedding code seems a bit passé.  Based on my conversation with co-founder Josh Manley, it’s only a matter time before more robust sharing tools are added.

While distributed commerce is a huge, untapped opportunity, there are also some monster, savvy companies such as Amazon and eBay starting to dip their toes in the water.  Cartfly’s challenge will be to gain momentum and traction and mindshare before Amazon and eBay really get after it.

As we all know, widgets can propagate in a hurry.  Cartfly seems to be checking all the right boxes to make a serious run at this space.

Here’s my Cartfly store – the armoire really is for sale.  The Mexican Beer Sampler, alas, is not.

Wanted: Designer of Social Apps

My employer, RateItAll, is hiring again.  Please let me know if you are, or know, this person.  Here's the req:

UI Designer – RateItAll, Inc.

RateItAll is an up and coming distributed rating community built upon one of the most extensive and diverse online databases of user opinions, ratings, and reviews in the world.  Visitors to the site can rate and review virtually anything – products, travel, politics, games, movies, beer, food, local businesses, etc, and share in the advertising revenue associated with their content contributions.

RateItAll provides a stable of free widgets, apps, and feeds making its content and functionality available on virtually any website.  Our goal is to be the de facto consumer rating engine for the web.

Quantcast ranks RateItAll among the busiest 4,000 websites in the US, and according to Google Analytics, there have been more than 1M visits to the site in the last thirty days. 

We are seeking a star UI designer that can help us improve our existing site’s user experience, as well as design our various apps and widgets.  The position reports directly to the CEO, and is expected to play a critical role in the company.  We are a very small team.  This is an opportunity to make a major impact with a start-up that has already achieved significant traction.

The successful candidate will be a star designer, hungry, obsessed with social media (both as a user and from a design perspective), expert in designing interactive web systems, and up to the unique challenges of designing apps and widgets that reside on multiple domains but tie back to a destination website (and brand).

Responsibilities:

- Create a distributed design strategy which balances our desire to maintain a consistent brand across domains with the need to blend in to the host site experience
- Fully own interface design from concept through implementation (creating sketches, flows, wire frames, detailed designs, specs, and templates)
- Lead the efforts to redesign critical components of our UI, including our rating engine and various content publishing tools
- Design and tune our various SNS apps including Facebook, Bebo, and MySpace.
- Design and tune our stable of widgets

Skills and Requirements:

- Mastery of A/B design testing techniques
- Deep understanding of what is possible with CSS. Javascript, HTML, and AJAX
- 3-4 years experience in designing social media interfaces
- 3-4 years of startup experience
- Experience in widget and app design preferred
- Some experience with Flash preferred
- Located in the San Francisco Bay Area or willing to get there.

If you are this person or know this person, please send me an email.

Widgeteers at AdTech

I took a stroll through the exhibition hall at AdTech and ran into a couple of innovating widget companies with an eye towards being ad networks.

Carnet (sorry I missed you Carnet) and the guys from Sprout / Chipin were in from Hawaii demonstrating their build your own widget engine.

Dapper was there pushing something they are calling MashupAds which sits between the publisher and the advertiser.

And Triggit was there demonstrating their very cool tool that allows you to easily drag and drop ads into any page you own.

It shouldn't surprise anyone that widgets are getting more visibility in the world of advertising.  If advertising is about spreading a message, widgets are certainly an important tool towards accomplishing that goal.