Sexy Widget

The New RateItAll Consumer Review Widget

Today RateItAll launched a read / write consumer review widget that we are very proud of.  The publishing experience is not bad for such a small footprint, the widget is fast, and Facebook Connect is provided as a login option.  More importantly, we think this widget makes consumer reviews accessible to the high percentage of Internet users who are quite comfortable copying and pasting a chunk of code, but not so comfortable developing on an API.

The widget is available for the more than 2.2M items in our database, including everything from movies, to local businesses, to gadgets, to beverages, to politicians, and much more.  You can see it modeled in the sidebar of this blog - try posting a review.

We've gone to market with more than 100 launch partners.  Here are some of them:

Web Apps: 2Big2Send, Buxfer, Medgle, CitiAlly, CleanTechies, Tripsay, Cloud Disk, Commuto, Colnect, ExpertsColumn, Fan History, Fantazzle, FreeTideTables.com, Lefora, Mavrev, Morthix, MyGridironSpace, MyWikiBiz, OurConvo, PlayPing, Producteev, RaaajChat, Rainfall of Envelopes, RentersQ, Resnooze, Stuffpit, TasteKid, TechMunch, Tubefilter, TweekGeek.com, TweetTweetMe, Vigster, WaTunes

Agencies: Samasource, ElaborateSEM, Compu-Clean, Designious, Dreams Media, Vertical Measures, Goldstein Media, GSolutions Online, InterGraphicDESIGNS, JR Language Translation Agency, Webfeathers, Your Design Online

Software: Crossloop, Addaptron, Screencast Pro, TBG Security

Blogs: Sexy Widget (!), Stuntdubl, Sprol, eBykr, The Noe Farm Report, LenaCardell.com, The RateItAll Blog, Stickiwidgets, Easy Green Living, F***ART Blog, Mobile Buzz

eCommerce Sites: Asanea Gifts, Decorish.com, Giftah, Juvie, Kan Thai Decor, Active Health Supply

Online Comics: The System

Ad Networks: BlogUpp

Musicians: Giovanni String Quartet, Buddy Ivory

Local Businesses: Align Chiropractic, Miami Carpet Cleaning, The Finer Details, Back to the Past Comics, Fix'n'Tweak Computer Services, Hollywood Tans, Horizon Yacht Charters, Kokopelli Ski Holidays, Theresa Minnette Photography

To get your own widget for your site, blog, product, self, or anything else, click HERE.

Widget Smackdown Event - June 17

Well,this should be fun.

I am moderating an all-star studded widget event at SF New Tech on Wednesday, June 17.

This won't be your typical panel of demos.  We will be comparing, side by side, head to head, several of the biggest and most innovative players in the widget space.

Clearspring vs. Gigya in widget infrastructure

Sellit vs. Adgregate Markets in widget commerce

Sprout vs. iWidgets in widget publishing

On hand will be Hooman Radfar, Carnet Williams, Peter Yared, Kurt Collins, Rooly Eliezerov, and Henry Wong representing their respective companies.  If you are interested in widgets and distributed web strategy, this is a can't miss event.

There may even be a surprise product announcement.

What went wrong with Splashcast's widget?

Splashcast today announced that they are discontinuing the free widget publishing tool that won them so much early acclaim from sites like TechCrunch, Webware, and yes, Sexy Widget.  Splashcast looked so promising that TechCrunch's lead editor at the time (and one of the top social media analysts, now writing for RWW), Marshall Kirkpatrick jumped ship and joined Splashcast as their Director of Content.

I described Splashcast as follows in my January, 2007 post:

SplashCast has just launched an ambitious service that lets you broadcast content channels (made up of video, RSS feeds, text, music, photos, etc.) to a Flash widget that can be embedded on blogs or profile pages.  Modifying a content channel via your SplashCast control panel updates that channel wherever it appears around the Web.

It was write once, post anywhere.  It pulled in multiple media channels.  And it was nicely put together.

In discussing what went wrong, CEO Mike Berkley had some interesting quotes today on TechCrunch:

“Most of us would rather consume than create. This is one of the big ticket findings of the Web 2.0 technology wave.”

“We were hoping to launch a publishing revolution. What we found, however, is that very few users are willing and able to make an ongoing commitment to publishing and distributing content. Lots of users test; few stick with it.”

“Like so many other Web 2.0 companies, we simply haven’t found a way to meaningfully monetize user generated content. Users are loathe to pay meaningful subscription fees. Furthermore, advertising on user-generated video content hasn’t played out—just ask YouTube.”

And from the Splashcast blog, from Tom Turnbull:

"Three months ago, we asked you (our publishing community), whether you would be willing to pay for the service.  The vast majority answered “no.”  Furthermore, among those willing to pay, the average amount was extremely low."

"Additionally, advertising is not a realistic option.  We’ve explored several approaches.  While we love your content, advertisers aren’t willing to pay a reasonable price to sponsor it."

My own thoughts on Splashcast?  I would agree with much of what these guys said - to run a business off of ads showing up in widgets, you need tremendous scale.  Clearspring or Gigya kind of scale.

And precisely because Splashcast's tool was such a hit with the early adopter community, might have played a role in why it wasn't destined to reach that sort of scale.

This was no mass market product - this was a powerful, complex tool designed to appeal to creative, early adopters.  Which it did.

Musestorm has a robust widget publishing tool that they chose to license to agencies.  Sproutbuilder turned off the free version of their widget publishing tool in January, instead choosing to license it to big brands.

Ad supported businesses need scale to have a chance.  Ad supported widget businesses need massive scale, because of the small footprint, and lack of placement control associated with widgets.  And the more complicated your product is, perhaps the less likely you are to reach that scale.

Of course, I noted none of these points in my early review of Splashcast.  It sounds like they have a promising plan b in their "Social TV" product, and I wish them the best of luck in their transition.

When will Google Expose Local Business Data to Developers?

It seems like a lot of companies are working on location based applications in an effort to serve the growing number of people accessing the Internet from a mobile device.  One of the more common application types is to detect the location of the user, and display local businesses near them - apps like Yelp, GoodRec, UrbanSpoon, and as of today, Google all do a pretty good job of this.  Other apps like Foursquare and Brightkite attempt to do slightly different things based on local business data, and there are countless other web applications built on top of local business data.

The common denominator needed to build these sorts of applications is access to up to date and accurate local business information - business name, street address, phone number, city and state, zip code.

As of today, there are two ways to get this sort of data in large quantities; 1) scrape it from other services; 2) license it from companies like Acxiom and InfoUSA.

Local business data is notoriously difficult to keep up to date.  I've heard estimates that up to 40% of all local business data goes stale per quarter.  With a centralized approach, such as the call centers operated by Acxiom and InfoUSA, it is a costly (and lucrative) proposition to keep this data fresh.

To me, the sale of local business data seems like an industry in grave danger of getting wiped out.

Yesterday, Google announced a new local business dashboard, designed to incentivize local businesses to claim their listing on Google.  Claiming a business means being responsible for keeping its data updated, thus eliminating the need for centralized data providers.

Would it shock anyone if Google were to expose this local business information in exchange for attribution, much like they did with the Google Maps API?  Not only would a local business data API represent another snippet of code to suck analytics data back from countless websites, but Google's mobile platform, Android, would stand to benefit from increased numbers of location based applications.

This wouldn't be the first time that Google wiped out an industry overnight - just ask those that competed with Urchin, now Google Analytics.

The Outside In Social Media Strategy

I've been talking a lot on this blog about maximizing your site's distribution via social media river services like Facebook and Twitter. 

And there are LOTS of folks working on this.  In just the past few weeks, Socializr, Digg, Lunch.com, and my employer RateItAll, to name a few, have announced tighter Facebook and Twitter integration.  Spymaster is an even more pronounced example of a service that is uber-optimized for Twitter distribution.

The idea here is pretty simple - find ways to push, or help your users push, your site's activity out into the larger social media rivers, with the hopes of driving clicks back to home base.

Let's call this the Inside Out strategy.

But what would happen if we we flipped this strategy on its head?  What if in addition to optimizing your site's activity for distribution on Facebook and Twitter, you tweaked your service to accept content from activity within those services? 

Here are some examples of what I'm talking about:

- a blog comments service in which you could post your comment on Twitter or your Facebook status
- a polling app where you could create your poll via a tweet
- a social game where points are earned via activity on Facebook and Twitter (Spymaster incorporates a bit of this)
- a rating app where ratings could be published via a tweet or status update

Outside In is not a new strategy.  There are plenty of examples out there - Posterous posts are created via another app (email) and aggregated on Posterous.com.  The vast majority of content on FriendFeed originates on other networks.  The appropriately named Outside.in pulls in blog posts from around the web that have a hyperlocal slant.  Mahalo's QA site has a scraper that pulls in questions (any question) from Twitter (sometimes against the will of the originating site), and the defunct Edgeio was an early pioneer in aggregating classified ad listings.  All of these services refused to restrict the content publishing piece of their service to their own domain.

Other than Friendfeed, which doesn't really count as it's story agnostic, I haven't seen any services gain traction by coming up with a standard to accept content via Twitter or Facebook statuses:

e.g. #poll What's the best blog? #1 Sexy Widget #2 Widgify #3 Sprol

The main hurdles to overcome would seem to be A) The simplicity of the posting format; and B) the character limit.

I expect to see some folks try though.