« August 2006 | Main | October 2006 »
Chris Cant's developer blog: Snipperoo widget.
Snipperoo widget
The Snipperoo widget management system is in beta. It lets you turn any code snippet into a "widget". One or more widgets are then placed on a "panel". Snipperoo then provides a JavaScript "codeline" for you to copy into your site, blog, etc.
At 11.30 this evening we finally rolled out the Beta to those who had signed up over the last few months. As always, there's so much more I wish we'd got into this release - but we never would have got it out the door. Our aim now, having released early, is to release often. If you got the email, I really hope you take a good look at Snipperoo. It requires a bit of commitment to get started, but once installed it's easy and fun.
I'll be talking a lot more over the next few months about what we do, what we want to do and what's coming next. And there's a lot of stuff to come next.
Our Snipperoo widget directory is filling up and has now reached nearly 300 entries. That might not sound like much, but its now reasonably comprehensive. I'm aiming to put a lot more stuff in it over the next few weeks - and hopefully widget producers and you readers will help me out. My target for next year is 3000 widgets.
We'll be redesigning the directory later in the year to make it more interactive and more representative of what's in it. In the meantime, use it as your widget resource.
And you can subscribe to an RSS feed of new widgets. Get your daily widget updates from Snipperoo.
Various people tentatively propose a Widget conference. Had to happen, only a matter of time
WidgetCon at Om Daily.
Dare wants to talk to widget creators. I think it is a great idea. I am happy to host Dare in SF, and perhaps we can put together an informal event to talk widgets. You know I love that stuff. Niall, say what? Anyway else wants to jump in and play along, please do. Meebo & Rock U team…. what do you think?
Kevin Maney from USA Today gets phased:
Tech industry spews doohickeys so fast we can't keep up
There is so much coming so fast from so many corners that nobody can possibly keep track, much less ever, ever try using it all.
Money is flying into ventures that most people east of Palo Alto, Calif., would find incomprehensible. Dash Navigation got $17 million from high-profile venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Dash bills itself as a "social network of traffic data" — allegedly getting cars to wirelessly talk to each other about where they are and reporting to the network if they're wheezing through bumper-to-bumper traffic.
Hard to say if it will work, but if you add "social network" to anything right now, you can get $17 million. Walk into a venture firm's office and say, "I've got a social network for hermits." Boom. Seventeen million dollars.
Which is crazy, because no one needs millions of dollars to build a consumer Web business anymore. In fact, that's why there are so many new sites. Creating a complex site is way easier and probably 10 or 15 times cheaper compared with six years ago, tech entrepreneurs say.
At the same time, ad dollars are rushing to the Web. David Court of consulting firm McKinsey says, "In the next 24 months, we will see demand for online advertising actually outstrip the supply." That's why we're getting so many consumer websites: They're easy to build and a booming market for ads.
Pretty soon, neighborhood kids will stop setting up lemonade stands and instead build Ajax-driven photo-tagging recommendation engines, or some other confluence of buzzwords.
You can tell that some insiders sense a bubble-ishness in the air.
Like, I met with Gordon Gould, a successful, surfer-dude serial entrepreneur who just launched ThisNext. It is social networking crossed with shopping — or, to use his freshly minted buzzword, "shopcasting."
Throughout his presentation, he kept tossing around one overheated catchphrase after another — the wisdom of crowds, the long tail, product discovery — and then, to his credit, apologizing for it. "We'll take ThisNext to the blogosphere — which is a terrible term," Gould said at one point, seemingly tired of his own industry's rhetoric.
Then I met with Tony Conrad, co-founder of the new blog search site Sphere. Bloggers that day were jabbering about a redesign of del.icio.us — a social networking tagging community something-or-other site. And we got talking about the gaggle of sites popping up and how a lot of them seem just too geeky for words.
In this spirited conversation, I made the admission: "And I still don't know what the hell del.icio.us is good for!" Expecting Tony to lecture me on the momentous development that is del.icio.us, he instead grinned, threw up his hand and high-fived me.
Captain’s Log: MySpace copping an attitude.
I don’t think that’s really a big factor in MySpace’s success, which is why I’m not convinced that pissing off their developer community will result in utter failure as it did in the past for companies like Ashton-Tate. Browsing MySpace, I generally find that the only “widgets” people use are:
1. The embedded (Myspace-provided) music player
2. A fancy layout from a site that sells/gives away myspace layouts
3. An occasional embedded picture hosted by a site like photobucket (hardly a ‘widget’)
4. An occasional embedded movie from YouTube
5. An occasional slideshow widget for picturesThat’s pretty much it as far as mainstream “widgets” go. There are a lot of companies building widgets, but I don’t see a lot of people using them. So, I find it hard to believe that MySpace owes any significant portion of it’s success to it’s development community - with the notable exception of the myspace layout folks, who obviously don’t have a business apart from myspace.
Om Malik put his finger on the pulse for Business 2.0 with Suddenly everything's coming up widgets
Suddenly everything's coming up widgets Breaking down the Web into small, portable pieces is the smart trend that everyone from Nokia to Google is betting on.
Tom Soft ponders Mashup vs Widget? (I advise reading the whole thing, it makes more sense)
So what are the real differences between the two? Today, a mashup is more a programmer affair, while widget is more an end user technology. The other actual difference is that most of the time, the newly creating service imply that there is glue between all data sources (for instance, some code to put house locations on Google map) while widget does not speak each other: the clock widget does not talk with your flickr badge widget, etc…
But the limitation starts to fade down, and I think that this will slowly disappear, and I am quite sure that there is probably tons of widget that act as “mashup”.
Robert Gaal at Widgetoko is moving on to pastures new and obviously wants to focus. He's put Widgetoko up for sale. I've offered to take it off his hands and run it well - it would be a good fit with the directory. Now we just have to wait and see whether anyone offers him more than $0 for it.
However, as of now, I’m putting the “for sale” sign up in front of this blogs house. I’m so incredibly busy setting up my own start-up at the moment (more on that later) and maintaining this blog can’t be one of my priorities anymore unfortunately. You won’t believe how time consuming this all was, really. Fun though, and I certainly am still interested in the unique niche topic that Widgetoko covers (web widgets), but my calendar tells me to make some decisions. I’d also love this site to have somebody behind it that can develop it to the fullest. So I’m not going to be a total sell-out: I’m looking for a buyer who understands web widgets and who wants to keep making Widgetoko a good and solid widget resource, or something in line with this.
You'll note that each post here is now wrapped around with links to our Widget Directory. I've put these in using our widget management system, currently in heavy testing. I've also spent a lot of the weekend putting widgets into the directory. It currently lists almost 300 widgety things, making it the largest widget gallery in the world. Now, we have big plans for the directory, and we'd like everyone to think of it as a first port of call. Put your widgets in there, put other people's widgets in there. We've got a lot of things coming down the track - but if you want widgets to get good distribution, maybe the widget directory is where they can start. Oh, and we'll have our own Widget Directory badge for you soonest!
