Widget Death Match

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.

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.

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:

1. A standard photo gallery widget
2. A standard slideshow widget
3. A standard tag cloud widget, with a twist – it also grabs technorati tags and auto-extracts additional tags from your content
4. A standard feed content widget (good for easy content syndication!)
5. 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.

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:

Danny’s warming up for Widget Death Match Round 2 with a few practice widgets, such as this Facebook widget that shows his friends feed: