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.

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.

Ever wanted a simple Twitter widget, or a Flickr widget that’s styled to match your personality? How about a slick blog widget that you can post on MySpace, Facebook, or any other social network? Why not get all 3 at once, via the KickApps App Studio?

Here’s another one from Widget Maestro Mike Sommers:

Mike explains:

“It’s cool because it allows me to easily import all my activity from Flickr (where I store my photos), Twitter (where I save souls) and WordPress (where I blog) into my SommersPeople community profile page… Write once, publish everywhere!”

So there’s 1 widget that combines Flicker, Twitter, and a personal blog. Mike then pasted it on his social network profile page, just for good measure.

Think Widgets aren’t cool? Wrong! Mike’s widgets are being picked up by A-list celebrities such as Shaq and MC Hammer! If you have a Twitter feed you can also widgetize your information.

There’s a cool new feature in the KickApps Widget Studio that allows you to define certain things to happen according to a video player’s timeline. In the example below, there are little “instructional balloons” at 11 seconds, 40, 1:16, 1:52, 1:59, 2:09, 2:30 (interactive, booyeah!), 2:46, 2:54, and 3:09.

Round 1 came to an early conclusion as Simon conceded victory to Mike! In Simon’s own words:

Below are Simon and Mike’s round 1 widgets. You will need sound turned on for both.