Last week, iWidgets founder Peter Yared was nice enough to come by RateItAll’s office and give our team a demo of his new widget publishing tool.
The easiest way to describe the interface is as PowerPoint meets Yahoo! Pipes. You can pull in RSS feeds, tie data streams together, and easily change formatting.
Yared sees the key differentiators of iWidgets versus other tools such as Sproutbuilder as follows:
- iWidgets is native. While historically, when a widget is published, it shows up in the exact same format wherever it is published, iWidgets sucks in the formatting of the host environment – for example, if an iWidgets widget is published to Facebook with default formatting, the widget will automatically know to present action buttons in the blue, Facebook-y style
- iWidgets is action oriented. iWidgets is not about creating static display badges – it’s about sucking in user activity via RSS feeds and presenting fresh activity in a customized, user designated way
IWidgets has two features planned for the next month or so:
- A tool that will check if a feed has updated and update FBML on Facebook (so that the widget will update without the user having to click on the canvas page)
- A tool that will publish news feed stories in Facebook that correlate to actions captured by an iWidgets widget
If iWidgets can successfully pull off these two enhancements, they will be the closest thing I’ve seen to a true “build your own Facebook App” that goes beyond just a profile badge.
The company will offer an iWidgets branded widget for free, and a white label widget where the publisher will be charged on a CPC/CPM basis for clicks driven back to its destination site.
Here’s a widget that Peter built for us during our demo that allows RateItAll users to project their reviews onto their Facebook profile or anywhere else. You’ll note upon adding the Facebook App that users are prompted to plug in their own RateItAll nickname to configure the widget. This was a pretty powerful demo for me, as what Peter was able to do in ten minutes with his publishing tool was better than our existing profile widget which we paid about $1500 for, and that took several weeks to develop. I guess that's the whole point.
