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Netvibes CEO Steps Down

Netvibes was one of the original big widget success stories. However, it's increasingly hard to see where it goes from here. Tariq stepsdown as CEO, putting a nonentity in his place - something Tariq certainly never was.

Netvibes CEO Steps Down; Widget Platform Will Open Up

The founder of Netvibes is moving on. Tariq Krim is stepping down as CEO of Netvibes to “spend less time day-to-day” at the company and work on a “new project,” he tells me. (More details on that project later). He will remain on the board of the company and as a non-executive strategic adviser. Current Netvibes COO Freddy Mini will take over the helm as CEO.

“My role was to transfer Netvibes from a personal start page into a widget platform,” says Krim. He feels that the technical foundation for that shift has been completed with the recent release Ginger, the latest version of its site. Krim also reveals that, in an attempt to take on Google Gadgets, “All the technology around our widget platform will be open source.” The APIs and tools will be available on Friday at Netvibes.org. And they will also work for turning widgets into mobile apps.

US election: Watch the Widgets

ReadWriteWeb have a great way of assessing the state of the candidates in the US upcoming elections: watch the widgets. Well, doesn't really tell you much, but it's interesting to see the installed base. That said - it may just be that Obama people are Widgetbox type of people. Maybe Clinton's people are all installing like fury in iGoogle or Facebook!


Another Way to Measure Electoral Clout: Watch the Widgets - ReadWriteWeb

Even though last night's big contests in Kentucky and Oregon ended in a split decision, with big wins for both Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, most pundits now agree on who is most likely to be the Democratic nominee for president when the convention rolls around in August. Hint: it's the candidate who has dominated nearly every method we could think of to measure election momentum on the web. We got some data last night from widget-provider Widgetbox that shows the same trend for viral widget installs.

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Social network in a Gadget?

Reading the Google Gadget FAQ, it sure sounds like we'll see a form of social network springing up around this space soon. Is anyone working on this?
You can now have Friends, Profiles, Updates, Notifications, Messages, Friend invites with permission controls. Sound familiar?

iGoogle Gadgets

Friends

Who are friends in iGoogle?

For development purposes, you can add friends through the friends manager gadget included with the developer tools. You can only share activities with other friends who have access to the developer sandbox. This is not the final network that will be used in iGoogle. Users will have full control over who their friends are and will be able to easily modify their list of friends. Stay tuned for details.

Profiles

What are profiles in iGoogle?

For development purposes, you can modify your profile data (displayname and thumbnail) using the profile gadget included with the developer tools. This is not the final profile or data that will be used in iGoogle. Stay tuned for details.
Updates gadget

How often can a gadget post an activity to the Updates gadget?

A gadget can post up to 5 activities per user per day. For gadget development and testing purposes, these limits are not implemented in the sandbox. Posting activities requires explicit permission from the user granted during the installation of a social gadget.
Notifications / Messages

Will iGoogle support notifications?

Yes, you can send messages to users using requestSendMessage. Note that this feature is not yet implemented in the sandbox.

How often can a gadget send a message?

A gadget can send up to 10 messages per user per day. Sending messages requires explicit permission from the user granted during the installation of a social gadget.
Gadget Invites

Will iGoogle support inviting friends to add a gadget?

Yes, gadgets will be able to call a dialog box, prompting users to invite their friends. Gadgets cannot send invitations without the user initiating sharing and selecting friends. This feature is not enabled in the sandbox. Stay tuned for details.
Gadget Permissions

Can users control if gadgets can post updates, send messages, or send gadget invites?

Yes, a user will be asked to grant permissions when the user installs a social gadget.

OpenSocial Tutorial for iGoogle

And the rest…

Designing great social applications can be difficult, but the next steps are up to you. There's already a lot of documentation available, a helpful group for asking and answering questions, and a blog to keep you up to date. Here's to your application!

iGoogle to Get Ads This Summer

Steve Rubel blogs that iGoogle will get ads this summer. He doesn't know what they will look like. My question is - can ads in Gadgets be far behind?

Micro Persuasion: iGoogle to Get Ads This Summer

The site, which anecdotally I can tell you is getting very popular, will get a new canvas view (below) starting in June and social features over the summer. However, what's most notable is that iGoogle is getting ads. They have not shown yet what this will look like visually.

This is the current situation on ads in Gadgets - these are ads added by the creator, not by Google:

iGoogle Gadgets

Monetization

Will Google allow developers to include advertising in their gadgets?

Absolutely, but there will be some restrictions. Ads will be limited to the canvas view only and certain types of ads will not be allowed. Developers are free to use any ad provider to place ads in their gadget. However, we strive to maintain the best user experience, and as such, we plan on surveying users to determine how ads impact user satisfaction. Poor user ratings and reviews may impact a gadget's viral features, ranking, and directory listing.

What types of ads are allowed?

Ads cannot move across the page or expand beyond their initial bounds - they must hold a persistent location. No pop-up windows are allowed. Audio ads cannot be initiated without user action.

Widget system for linking to casual games

NeoEdge launches widget system for linking to casual games

NeoEdge, a casual-games-based ad network company has launched a system designed to make it easy for Web sites to add a widget that links to its library of games.

The company, which previously built a system that "wraps" ads around casual games like Diner Dash, is now attempting to leverage the huge popularity of such titles by making it simple for any Web site to use its widget and become a front end to its more than 400 games.

Widget Company Clearspring Raises $18 Million

Go Hooman!

Widget Company Clearspring Raises $18 Million

Widget syndicator Clearspring Technologies has closed financing of $18 million in a third round of funding from New Enterprise Associates, Novak Biddle Venture Partners and other investors.

The McLean, Va.-based company also announced that New Enterprise Partner Harry Weller and Capital One co-founder Nigel Morris have joined former AOL heavyweights Ted Leonsis, Steve Case and Miles Gilburne on its board of directors. Clearspring has raised a total of $35 million in venture capital to date.

With the fresh cash infusion, the company plans to expand its widget advertising products and further develop its ad network that spans more than 80 social networking and other sites including MySpace, Facebook and Blogger.

Israeli Widget Maker Musestorm Raises $1M

alarm:clock: Israeli Widget Maker Musestorm Raises $1M

Elron Electronic Industries (Nasdaq: ELRN; TASE: ELRN) has invested $1M in Israeli start-up MuseStorm and will own 23% of the company.

MuseStorm calls itself a Web 2.0 aggregator. It aggregates data from web APIs and RSS feeds and distributes it via widgets to Blogs, web sites, and mobile devices. Users include The Washington Post, Pageflakes and CBS.

The company makes money by selling its analytics. You can get Musestorm analytics free for 60 days and will then have to pay $4/month per feed for web widgets and the same price for Desktop widgets. The analytics engine will track impressions and clickthroughs for widgets located on web as well as user desktop.

Elron Electronic Industries (Nasdaq: ELRN; TASE: ELRN) has invested $1M in Israeli start-up MuseStorm and will own 23% of the company.

MuseStorm calls itself a Web 2.0 aggregator. It aggregates data from web APIs and RSS feeds and distributes it via widgets to Blogs, web sites, and mobile devices. Users include The Washington Post, Pageflakes and CBS.

The company makes money by selling its analytics. You can get Musestorm analytics free for 60 days and will then have to pay $4/month per feed for web widgets and the same price for Desktop widgets. The analytics engine will track impressions and clickthroughs for widgets located on web as well as user desktop.

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

The Centre Cannot Hold... The words of William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

Everything is crazy at the moment, which is as it should be. It's not so much widgets as the places that widgets go to and interactions between those places. Facebook, MySpace, Google, a titanic battle seems to be taking place - and a lot of commentators have the opinion that it is win or lose for the giant players. I think something else is happening - the realisation that there is no centre. Nothing in the social online world will have enough gravity to pull everything else in its direction. No Saturn, just plenty of Earths. Look at Google - it doesn't even have any skin in the game, it doesn't have a social network to play against the others, but it knows that tools to push and connect networks is what this is really about. Everything else is just features. And widgets are the carriers, the neutral players in this crazy mixed up space. Everybody references the humble widget as a part of the picture. I've been preaching it for years now - fragment your content and allow it to find its own way in the world. You can't hold it to the centre - the centre cannot hold. It's mere anarchy now. Enjoy.

Tracking social graph in graffiti

Marc tracks social graph in graffiti on his yard fence. Now, what he should do is animate it LIKE THIS:

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.


Marc’s Voice » Blog Archive » I do not compromise

Meanwhile Michael asked me to post some images of the mural’s work in progress. Its going to evolve all summer. But here are some works in progress shots - with annotation:

More excellent speakers

I'm happy to announce that I've just rounded out the conference with some more excellent speakers. I'll be doing a full speaker roundup over the next few days - for the moment, here's Jonathan Mendez - his blog is well worth a read.

Jonathan Mendez's Blog

I’m very excited that I was just asked to speak at the WidgetWebExpo. I’ll be sharing some of RAMP Digital’s recent work on Adplications, discussing how the Intelligent Web and the use of APIs and Semantics is going to redefine display advertising and showing the first ever Google Gadget Ad that RAMP has been working with Dapper and Google on.

Friend Connect, Widgets, Ning

Marc Andreessen points out what Friend Connect is, isn't and how it's really all about widgets (as usual).

Friend Connect, Open Social, Ning, and the web

Friend Connect is a mechanism by which Open Social gadgets can be published and used not just within a social network but also beyond that social network. When an Open Social gadget shows up elsewhere on the web, via Friend Connect, the friend data and social context comes with the Open Social gadget from its origin social network -- and that origin social network might be a network on Ning or a large walled garden network like MySpace or Orkut, and that Open Social gadget might be embedded on any page anywhere on the web.

In a sense, Friend Connect one-ups Flash widgets. Many social networks and other content hubs today publish Flash widgets like video players and music players that get embedded in pages all over the web. Friend Connect is a mechanism that provides the embedding capability for Open Social gadgets to be used all throughout the web -- with the added benefit that with a Friend Connect-enabled Open Social gadget, the user gets her social context anywhere she goes, which isn't the case with a typical Flash widget.

Gettin' religion

Marc Canter is excellent at tracking what's going on with social networking and everything around it, not disinterested in the space, not afraid to say what he thinks - and speaking at WidgetWebExpo. If you're confused, or want a quick primer, or want to get confused - read the entire piece below.

The Religion of Bringing Social to Software

Profiles, social graphs and user’s content is starting to get encapsulated and plopped into external web sites, blogs and other social networks. The user’s data stays locked up in the originating site, but varying levels of integration, access and ‘inviting’ IS being enabled. This plopping is happening in different ways. Some via widgets, some via full gadget and app integration and everything in-between. APIs are now being offered to access social graphs, permissions and privacy is being maintained and the definition of lock-in and openness is being re-invented as we speak. In most cases user’s will be empowered to access their list of friends from the originating site and “invite’ their friends into the destination sites or services. That’s a good thing. Most probably that ‘invitation’ will get sent via the private messages system of the originating site, not via SMTP and free, open email. In all cases the user’s data stays locked-up on the originating site and what we’re seeing is every ingenious mechanism, technique and route around these four platforms can figure out - to KEEP that user’s data locked-in. That’s my summary of what’s going on. We still have a fight to fight.

Sprout gets funded

VCMike writes about the widget space and why they are backing Sprout

Why Polaris is Backing Sprout

Back in 2006 I met Hooman Radfar and the Clearspring team, and posted that they were the most interesting company at Web 2.0 that year.

Since then, “widget” has gone from a hot buzzword to the term commonly used to describe a fundamental shift in the architecture of the World Wide Web: The web’s basic building block is shifting from a “website” with a fixed location to embeddable, portable chunks of content – widgets, gadgets, whatever you want to call them.

We’ve been on the widget bandwagon for some time now, and are thrilled to have found a team in the space to back: Sproutbuilder, who today is announcing a $5M Series B that we led. Sprout has quickly established itself as the early leader for creating, launching and managing this fast-emerging content format, much like our portfolio company Allaire did with website creation a decade ago, and we think Sprout has a similar opportunity to build tremendous value.

An Open Format for Embedding Media

oEmbed: An Open Format for Embedding Media - ReadWriteWeb

oEmbed is a newly released spec from Cal Henderson (of Flickr), Mike Malone and Leah Culver (of Pownce), and Richard Crowley (of OpenDNS) that allows web sites to quickly and easily embed media when a user posts a link directly to that resource. oEmbed is an open format which standardizes the process of embedding photos, videos, links, or other media and circumvents the media provider's API (or the need for screen scraping if they don't offer one). It works by turning a link to, say, a photo or video into XML or JSON that tells the user how to embed that media.

"oEmbed is a format for allowing an embedded representation of a URL on third party sites. The simple API allows a website to display embedded content (such as photos or videos) when a user posts a link to that resource, without having to parse the resource directly," says the authors on the oEmbed web page.

Hooman Radfar to keynote

I thought I'd let the great (widget)man say it himself:

Widgify » Blog Archive » Hoo be Speaking @ WidgetWebExpo

Conference season, conference season. How we love the conferences. I will be a keynote speaker at the WidgetWebExpo in NYC this year. The conference is being held June 16-17.

Here is the scoop:

Extend and optimize your marketing through web, mobile and desktop Widgets

* Learn from major agencies, widget tool vendors, developers and media groups who are using widgets on the web and on mobile, desktop and other platforms.
* Map out your widget strategy from a commercial and technical perspective
* Whether you are a widget maker or a widget user, this is the place to learn, to share and to become inspired.

Give me a shout if you are around NYC and want to talk geek. Should be a great show!