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I thought I'd go crazy and break my own embargo and post some screen shots. Well, it's so exciting using our own product. What can I say - it's working great. It's very simple, there isn't much to it. The best things are simple. Sign up.
The main 'control panel' interface.
This is where you make your panels for display.
And this is a help page :-)
There, that's it, that's Snipperoo.
Having decided that the world was in love with widgets, we thought there needed to be a better way to manage them. Not something techie and difficult - and certainly not some more code - but a system that just worked for you. Our view is that you would just like to try out ineresting widgets you come across - and then get rid of them if they didn't work. We thought you'd probably like to control what order your widgets went in. We thought some of you might like to design the panel your widgets sit in, but some of you might not. We thought you might want to try out advertising or other money making widgets - or you might not. Your choice.
We knew you'd want to try this for free. And we knew you'd want it to 'just work', not to make anything even more complicated.
So we went out and built it. We believe in the internet and we belive in widgets.
The Snipperoo system is based on an original idea by Ivan, who told Jay, who said he could build it. Ivan then told Alison, who agreed she would be the person to look after the finances. Then Ivan told Steve, who agreed that VP of Evangelism and Customer Experience was exactly the job he had always wanted.
We think we've got a team with the right combination of experience and enthusiasm.
Snipperoo is based on the south coast of England, in bohemian Brighton. This is a buzzy media town full of artists and students, the right sort of environment for us. But we don't want no stinkin' code.
We believe we are building a product that will be of immediate help to everyone who ever wanted to add stuff to their site. We don't want to impress you with technology or design or our clever understanding of Web 2.0. We just want you to try out Snipperoo and see whether you agree that it is one amazingly useful bit of kit. Then, just use it and stay with us as we add functionality over the next few years. We think that once you start, you won't want to stop.
We promise that the free version will remain free forever. We promise that we will listen closely to our users and try to provide the tools they need. We promise that, while we believe in making money from our work, that we won't take money from you unless you specifically ask us to. In fact our aim is to help you achieve what you want to achieve. If you want to keep your site free from commercial taint, feel free. If you want to maximise revenues, we can help you do that. In fact, we can guarantee you will do that. If you want to go crazy with widgets, we'll give you the tools. Our ambitions are global - we're here to help you do what you want to do.
This blog is a mix. It's about Widgets, it's about the Widgetsphere and it's about Snipperoo. Snipperoo is a startup with a mission - to change the way we use plug-ins for our web sites by providing a platform that will allow everyone to take control of their widgets.
It's a holy mission because we believe that at the moment, code-snippets are broken. More and more companies roll out lovely plug-ins for sits, based on the concept of adding a little bit of code to the html of your web page. And that's dumb. Most of the worlds internet users will never see the html that makes up their chosen web page. They don't know about .html files and servers and uploads and tags. They don't know and they don't want to know. So every company that invests in a code based widget, is effectively taking aim at a small minority of the world's internet users. Maybe 20%. The rest of the world has not and will not learn to edit their home pages.
We already see a reponse to this. Host sites such as Typepad and Wordpress have implemented widgets within their sites, and lovely implementations these are too. You can choose from their list of available widgets and drag or embed what you want to use without ever seeing any code. Great stuff. But these sites are also flawed. They are closed silos and they control the widgets that are available. They can work as fast as they like, but they will only ever have a tiny minority of the world's available widgets on offer. We don't believe that users want to select from a tiny subset of widgets, and we don't believe that widget makers want to submit their widgets to dozens of different closed environments, one by one. We may be wrong, but this is what we believe.
So, Snipperoo is the Universal Widget. Universal in that our system will accept any widget in the world as soon as it is available. This is crucial to us. We have absolutey no interest in trying to second guess what widgets people want. Actually, we have no desire to even define what a widget is. Our view is that the world of widgets, the widgetsphere, has hardly got into gear, but it will come to define the internet within the next few years. Our part of that change is to enable anyone who wants to create a widget to distribute it as far and as wide as possible, to any audience that wants it, without having to make and remake it. And without having to rely on the end users ability to cut and paste code into their html.
We know that widgets are already big business. Google's AdSense is based on widgets, which means a large part of Google's revenue is derived from pursuading individuals to cut and paste a little bit of code into their web site. It's amazing that they've got this far, but we don't believe they've got much further to go with this model. Widgets are big business and will get much bigger. All ad networks rely on code widgets. Affiliate networks do. Almost all Web 2.0 companies to some degree or another rely on code widgets to distribute some part of their application, to plug into the network effect, to offer something for bloggers to use. This hasn't gone un-noticed by the offline world, or the non-2.0 business community. Widgets have a power beyond that of the little code snippet. Over the next few years we will see an explosion in the production and distribution of marketing widgets. In fact, I will bet that we see an entire industry grow up around this concept. Again, Snipperoo has a lot of ideas in this space, but we want to work with people to enable this, not to invent it ourselves.
And however strong the marketing widget industry becomes, we have a deeper belief in widgets, which is that they belong to everybody. To every charity, to every artist, to every sportsman, to every activist, to every politician, to every president. To every corner shop, to every race track, to every dirt poor nation, to every hacker and to every musician. They will become a powerful tool because the internet is a network of communities and widgets can be distributed within communities. The essential aspect of a successful widget will be that it gives and it takes. That it is part of a give and take web. A widget will have to carry within itself a reason to get embedded and a reason to get noticed. That is, it will have to reward the host and the visitor. Now, some widgets alrady do that, ad network widgets being a prime example. The host gets rewarded with ad revenue and the visitor gets rewarded with a successful link to a desired destination (in theory). So all widgets will have to grapple with this concept and successful widgets will be successful beyond all imagining. They will become the adverts of the 21st century.
There's a lot more to widget theory than this. But this is an introduction from a Snipperoo perspective. Within the next few weeks we will be public with our product and we will be encouraging everybody to grab hold of it with both hands and expand and extend it. We love what we've built and we think you will too. So what is it? Well, put one line of code in your blog or wherever and never go back there again. Add, remove and edit any widgets you want from your Snipperoo account. That's it.
If you want to keep up with the latest widgets, you can subscribe to our Widget Directory using RSS. The address of the New Widgets feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/newwidgets
You can click this to subscribe for New Widgets 
and you can use this code to put the link on your site:
<a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/newwidgets" title="Subscribe to my feed" rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"> New Widgets <img src="http://www.feedburner.com/fb/images/pub/feed-icon32x32.png" alt="" style="border:0"/></a>
You can also put the New Widgets panel in our right sidebar on your site by adding this code. It lists all new widgets added to our directory:
<!-- Feedo Style code version: X.1.
Copyright 2005-2006 Affinica.
-->
<script type="text/javascript">
//<![CDATA[feedostyle_id = "8eed99a4495b43798f883639022c9534";
feedostyle_show_caption = true;
feedostyle_show_summary = true;
feedostyle_show_source = true;
feedostyle_show_copyright = true;
feedostyle_rounded_corners = true;
feedostyle_width = "auto";
feedostyle_collapse_overflow = true;
feedostyle_new_window_links = true;
feedostyle_format = "vertical_marquee";
feedostyle_pause_time = 3000;
feedostyle_height = "380px";
feedostyle_summary_length = 300;
feedostyle_hide_footer = true;
feedostyle_show_date = false;
feedostyle_show_time = false;
feedostyle_page_background_color = "auto";
feedostyle_caption_subtitle_color = "auto";
feedostyle_foreground_color = "auto";
feedostyle_background_color = "auto";
feedostyle_border_color = "auto";
feedostyle_entry_count = 5;
feedostyle_theme = "vanilla";s
feedostyle_entry_spacing = "10px";
feedostyle_font_size = "small";
feedostyle_title = "New Widgets";
feedostyle_subtitle = "The newest widgets from the Snipperoo directory at directory.snipperoo.com";
feedostyle_caption_title_color = "#FF6633";
feedostyle_link_color = "#FF3366";//]]>
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://digest.feedostyle.com/feedostyle.js"></script>
<!-- End Feedo Style code version: X.1. -->
Ivan asked for some thoughts on the importance of widgets. Some of this is already orthodoxy but I guess these are the things that excite me about widgets:
If you want to know where all this 2.0 stuff is going, you could do worse than keep a very close eye on the Widgetsphere. Why? Widgets in their pure sense represent all that is right about online and how it is changing our lives. I call it the 'Give and Take Web' for good reasons. We don't just take what we want from the internet, we give back what we've got. Most of the successful tools of recent years allow us to define ourselves online, to be who and what we are rather than to allow companies and their marketing to define us. To a large degree, that is why the whole thing is so powerful. So, MySpace, YouTube, eBay, even Google, they all allow you to be what you are or what you want to be rather than imposing on you somone's idea of what you should be.
One of the key things that defines what you are is how you represent yourself online. So your blog or your videos or your items for sale or your friends all define how you see yourself and how you want others to see you. Some platforms, like eBay, MySpace, flickr or Blogger, allow you to set out your stall, to show who you are. Others, such as YouTube, flickr and many others, allow you to pick out what others have produced and integrate them into your world. A third kind of resource allows you to give away your own creations for others to integrate. Some sites do all three, some do one. The essential factor here is the economy of exchange, of give and take. During the give and take you are defined and you define yourself. It's a fluid mechanism, there is no finished work, so you need the method of definition to allow you to keep changing what you are giving and taking. Again, some platforms are good at this and others are not.
Some platforms lock you in to their worldview, others allow you total freedom. There is a tradeoff either way - making things easy to change often leads to a templated or fairly obvious end product shared by a lot of people. On the other hand, allowing anything to happen is both difficult for people to handle and can also lead to chaos. MySpace has elements of both of the above.
The point here is that we all want to be different, but not too different. We need to fit in with our chosen clique or class or club, but without losing our identity.
A widgetised web allows this to happen. With a widgetised web, everything you might want ot use comes to you as some form of widget for you to take, adapt and use. You effectively end up assembling your own online life from as many or as few widgets as you choose - so everybodies representation is different.
I coined a slogan to exemplify this - 'Don't put your stuff in your blog, put your blog in your stuff'. My hope is that very soon someone will build (if they haven't already) a blog composed entirely out of widgets. Or a wiki. Or a forum. Or all of them. Someone else will create a hosting platform that is designed to make it very easy to host widgets. Put these two together and we have a platform where everyone can choose their host and fill it with whatever widgets they want. There will be no pre-ordained 'central' application that you have signed up to and which sets the rules. Your blogging application will be as much a few widgets as your advertising network or your music videos or your IM widget.
So, although it is early days, you can already see the power of widgets and the route we are taking with them. Everybody I talk to now has a widget for their project. Because widgets are a means of distribution, a way to allow your application to be shared, a method of ensuring that your project can be used.
In a world where everyone uses MySpace, MySpace set the rules. If they decide (as they did this week) that they will make it harder for Flash widgets to refer to external sites, they don't have to ask permission to do this, they can just do it. It affects all their users and all other widget producers. It is a very old fashioned way of doing business (and dare I say it, a very Rupert Murdoch way of doing business). If MySpace was just another widget that you had in your choice of host site, around which you had wrapped as many other funky widgets as you wanted - then you would have all the functionality of MySpace without being a slave to their need to control the environment.
I predict it will only be a matter of months before hugely successful applications are launched entirely as widgets. You will sign up for an account as now, but you will have to find your own host for the widget. These new widgetised applications will spread like wildfire, but they will be unlike anything we have seen before as they spread throughout the inernet and mutate by coming in contact with millions of other widgets.
The widgetised future is just beginning.
(We're moving to the hippest, coolest, dodgiest part of Brighton)
Down a dark, dark, street ...
through a dark, dark, door ...
(next to a dark, dark, business)
in a dark, dark, office ...
Widgeteria!
...but it's bright and airy, it's got double-height ceilings, it's just next to the new New England Quarter development at the station, and it's got flexible terms and it's cheap.
It even gets the Minna seal of approval.
I was reading last week's Observer Music Monthly and there were reviews of a whole bunch of new albums that I'd like to try; Hype Machine to the rescue - it's an audio blog aggregator, so you can read reviews of many of the tunes and hear some of them too.
They've got a nice widget that you can customise and then add to your site:
