Widget Death Match » chris

Book Widget from Flashlight Worthy Books

chris — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 16:23:44 +0000

Like reading but having a hard time finding good book recommendations? Check out Flashlight Worthy Books, the hot new book site that provides lists of recommended books in specific categories. This is a great addition to any book lover’s blog:

our newest book liststhe best book lists can be found
at Flashlight Worthy Books
add this widget to your blog

Photo tree widget from Ovation TV

chris — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 05:49:21 +0000

Ovation TV won a SAMMY award today for it’s widget-powered social network, which quadrupled time spent on site and tripled their pageviews. here’s an example of one of their widgets, a tree made of photos of members’ art:

Sprint’s page of widgets

chris — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 22:36:54 +0000

Sprint’s “Now” ad campaign for their new 3G wireless network is anchored by a huge page of constantly-updating widgets (turn on your sound) that provide tons of useless but interesting facts, growing statistics, headlines, and video feeds. The feeds are sourced from a variety of external sources – each widget shows a small arrow on mouseover, that provides source information when clicked.

Via AppScout.

BBC sports widget includes content from other sites

chris — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 22:30:29 +0000

Paul Bradshaw at Poynter Online in the UK reports that the BBC recently launched a new sports widget that reports on rumors related to soccer – “football” over there – players’ trades and transfers between teams – “clubs” over there – when will they learn to speak English?

The football widget uses a vaguely-defined “web search technology” (Yahoo Pipes?) to pull soccer-related gossip from a variety of daily news sources, including:

Guardian Unlimited
Mail Online UK
Daily Record
The Telegraph
The Independent
Football 365
Sky Sports
The Times
Mirror.co.uk
The Sun
Sporting Life
TEAMtalk
Setanta Sports
Daily Star
Daily Express
Sunday People
News of the World

The move is apparently a continuation of the BBC’s dedication to more deeply integrate with the global news media ecosystem. The widget includes a second tab of news from the BBC itself, deftly positioning their own content in a featured position, so users who are initially interested in football gossip can get hooked on BBC Sports. It also offers sharing links (powered by Clearspring) that have become commonplace on widgets, allowing it to be virally swiped and distributed to new pages.

The BBC has described their soccer widget as a 3-month experiment based on the enduring popularity of BBC Sports’ “football gossip” column.

According to their site:

We will evaluate the feedback and statistical analysis captured during the trial prior to deciding whether to develop the product for use in a wider operational environment[.]

You can get the soccer widget here, and the BBC is soliciting feedback on the widget experiment from the same page.

Widget Death Match, round 2!

chris — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 22:45:39 +0000

It’s finally here – Widget Death Match round 2!

Before you consider the contestants, a reminder of the results of Widget Death Match round 1: despite his (now discontinued) awesome interactive Star Trek game, Simon lost by concession to Mike’s irie Reggae Widget.

Now, Mike’s back. Initially challenged by Andrew “Wags” W., Mike put together this slick all-in-one widget. Facing such an impressive display of widgetosity, Wags never got up the guts to enter the widget octagon, but young Danny M came out from nowhere with 2 different widgets to challenge Mike: a pirates vs. ninjas game widget and his own brand of all-in-one features.

Now it’s up to you, the judges to decide! If you like a widget, leave a comment in the respective post. We’ll add up the comments and declare a winner soon.

Video, blog, and message board widget

chris — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 22:41:44 +0000

Danny’s quickly become a master of the KickApps App Studio, recently releasing yet another multi-faceted widget. In this case, it’s a combo widget that shows videos, blog posts, and message board discussions from KickDeveloper.com, where Danny helps moderate the message boards and answer questions about, among other things, the KickApps App Studio.

Beautiful Blog Widgets from Wowzio

chris — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 16:58:35 +0000

Wowzio has recently listed a series of very cool “beautiful blog widgets“. The widgets make attractive use of dynamic photo content and their functionality includes:

A standard photo gallery widget
A standard slideshow widget
A standard tag cloud widget, with a twist – it also grabs technorati tags and auto-extracts additional tags from your content
A standard feed content widget (good for easy content syndication!)
My personal favorite, a “Live Activity” widget that displays a live, constantly updating, feed of recent views to your site. Every time the widget loads on a page, it detects the reader’s geographic location and referring page. That information then appears in the widget feed on all of your pages, letting readers see the most popular content on the site.

Wowzio is still in private beta, but if you request an invite you can probably score access to their widgets builder. I can’t wait to see how the Wowzio widgets stand up in a death match! Many of the standard Wowzio widgets would have a hard time standing up to some of the widgets that Danny and Mike have built, which integrate photos, videos, blog posts, and more into a single widget, but the Live Activity widget is a powerful offering in the widget space.

More Widgets at the “Me on Widgets” blog

chris — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 23:23:45 +0000

I recently discovered Me On Widgets, a blog whose author is creating many different widgets in a variety of environments, including the KickApps App Studio, Clearspring, and others. Some are flash widgets and, more recently the author has begun to dabble in JavaScript widgets.

In addition to a Flickr photo widget that displays images about rain and a YouTube video widget, both of which appear on every page within the blog, other widget highlights include:

Keep up the widget madness, mystery widget blogger!

Holiday Widget from DotcomCowgirl!

chris — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 23:05:32 +0000

Haylie over at DotcomCowgirl sent me a link to this holiday widget over, well, the holidays. It’s a fun use of interactive widgets to build an immersive, themed environment that also shows us yet again that Haylie is a master of the KickApps platform and online social interaction in general.

Haylie’s expertise extend far beyond just widgets – for some stellar examples of the breadth of her skills, check out KADeveloper.com.

Danny’s “Pirates vs. Ninjas” widget

chris — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 22:40:19 +0000

Here’s a new Widget from the KickApps App studio, built by widget adept Danny M. It integrates multiple flash games (one for pirates, one for ninjas) into a single widget: