(* Source: Eric Alterman *) 

Widget providers increasingly are bypassing portals and distributing content directly to user-controlled pages, requiring portals to evolve. KickApps' founder explains.

The universe of websites has a very long tail, and soon it will be clear that earning real estate on those websites will be the primary mission of every major portal. Widgets will play an ever-increasing role in this evolution.

Prediction: Portals like AOL, MSN and Yahoo will eventually generate more impressions and ad inventory by exporting widgets to third-party websites than by serving retail traffic within their own domains.

Most people are still trying to figure out what widgets really are and their importance, but few are looking at the role traditional internet portals will play in this new ecosystem. The major content portals like AOL and Yahoo used to define "distribution" when it came to web content (as both creators and acquirers of original content). Then widgets came along and increasingly "distributed" that distribution power to individuals and their personal pages (e.g. social networking pages, blogs).

The problem for traditional portals is that content producers and third-party widget providers increasingly have convenient ways to bypass portals by distributing content and other user experiences directly to consumer-controlled pages. While the major portals often own social network traffic (e.g. AIM Pages) and feed aggregators (e.g. MyYahoo), that traffic increasingly is splintered by third-party content and widget providers. In short, the entire web community is aggressively fishing in portal waters, and there are good reasons to expect that trend to accelerate.

More here 

Posted by brian tiong at 11:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

(* Source: Marta Strickland *)

Behold the amazing power of Sprout, a quick and easy way to build all those widgets, jukeboxes, and mini-sites you've been dreaming of, both for clients and personal projects. My first endeavor into using the service, aka my first Sprout, was a widget of passion.

Even before going on my big fall eurotrip, I decided that upon returning I was going to chuck out the idea of the traditional scrapbook and latch onto more web 2.0 ways of recording my experiences. By using Sprout, I was able to develop a "mini-site" of most of my digital vacation artifacts (music, photos, videos, maps, research) within a few hours, and to their credit, most of that time was spent in designing, collecting, and uploading.

The actual interface within Sprout Builder made the entire process intuitive and quick, and when I was finished, I was able to instantly bring my Sprout into my Myspace page, Facebook page, Netvibes account, and now here on ThreeMinds. Although it has a few bugs and limitations, I was more surprised at how much it COULD do and how much it did well. Any users of Photoshop or Flash will be able to dive right in, but I think it would be easy to pick up for most anyone.

Posted by brian tiong at 01:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

(* Source: Michael Arrington *)

Mike says...

San Francisco/Seattle based music service iLike launched a “news feed” for favorite artists this week. Users can now see exactly what their favorite artists are up to - when they go on tour, release new songs or videos, etc, the news is presented to them in the feed.

Users can select their favorite artist via the iLike website or on their social network applications. Or the service decides what you like based on your playing habits on iTunes (they have an iTunes plugin - if you listen to a song ten times, it thinks you like the artist).

The news feed for favorite artists can be viewed via the iTunes plugin, the website, the social network applications, or via a new iPhone app (just go to iLike on an iPhone and log in).

The company continues to dominate the Facebook music scene. Their U2 page on Facebook has 1.9 million fans. Compare that to just 168,000 friends on the MySpace U2 page, and 933,000 on Last.fm. The fact that a previously unreleased U2 song was first heard on iLike didn’t hurt those numbers, either.

In July 2007 iLike had 4.5 million users of its Facebook application. Today they have 14 million. But more than half of their new members today are coming from their iLike.com site and other social networks - OpenSocial gave them access to Bebo, Hi5 and soon MySpace. On their website alone they see 3.5 million worldwide monthly visitors, which isn’t bad considering most users interact with iLike via their iTunes plugin, or on Facebook and other social networks. Last.fm, which was acquired last year for $280 million, has 4.7 million.

Posted by brian tiong at 04:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

(* Source: eMarketer *)

MySpace and Facebook are less than five years old. Will widgets stick around that long?

Posted by brian tiong at 09:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

(* Source: eMarketer *) 

So far, widgets and applications are garnering far more attention than actual ad dollars. Although consumers are increasingly using them, eMarketer estimates that US companies will spend only $40 million in 2008 to create, promote and distribute widgets, up from $15 million in 2007.

The Web Widgets and Applications report tracks the trends that are driving this unique and intriguing, but not yet lucrative, area of Internet development.

Widgets are popping up everywhere online. Since Facebook opened up to third-party applications in May 2007, nearly 15,000 applications have been developed. Overall, some 100,000 developers are working on widgets and applications worldwide.

Widgets are new, hot and fun. But there are already raising concerns, including “application burnout,” measurement difficulties, distribution challenges and deceptive techniques used by some widget developers to increase their installation rate.

The widget and application business can really grow—it has some growing up to do.

More here 

Posted by brian tiong at 02:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

(* Source: b-side *)

B-side is an official media partner for Music Matters - The Asia Pacific Music Conference that is happening from the 3rd of June 2008 in Hong Kong.  Last years conference saw over 600 mover and shakers in the music world come together to share their views on the ever changing & challenging music space in Asia.

I was there last year and the segment I enjoyed most was the special appearance of the legendary Nile Rogers and his unplugged performance of his hit songs over the past 2 decades.  Truely inspiring.

This year, B-side is supporting this conference with the below free widget and email newsletter on what's happening in the digital music space. Go ahead...take it, spread it.

Posted by brian tiong at 10:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

(* Source: Kristen Nicole *)

With a reported 26,000 widget developers and 12 million daily widget views, along with a 15% market share of Facebook apps and 60% of Bebo apps, Widgetbox undoubtedly has a wide reach and is established in its space. Typically among the first to offer extended widget applications for integrated use in social networks’ platforms, Widgetbox has maintained much of its market share by providing its own widgets for such integrated use, while extending these same options for other developers.

Even with all of this effort, however, Widgetbox is still overshadowed in some areas by Clearspring, according to the most recent comScore Widget Metrix report, though there are current questions regarding the manner in which comScore has qualified widgets, their manner of distribution, and their viewership counts. Nevertheless, this latest round of funding will surely go towards accelerated efforts in continuing to grow its reach across platforms and devices. In terms of its widget suite of offerings, Widgetbox has been right there with the rest, launching a toolkit for creating Facebook applications, an ad-revenue sharing program, and a distribution method that reaches across various networks and web-based publishing tools.

With Clearspring’s widgetizing options and Sprout launching a web content-widgetizing utility at DEMO earlier this week, and several moves towards more analytical ad optimization for widgets, it’s clear that instant widget gratification and behavioral ad targeting are two of the hottest areas of exploration for widget companies, so I imagine Widgetbox will become even more heavily involved on these ends.

 

Posted by brian tiong at 12:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

(* Source: Mark Hendrickson *)

Ah... the great thing about web2.0 is that whatever you're thinking, somebody has also thought about it already.  Here is a good example as just the other day, i was thinking someone should make self service widgets... here it is.

Mark says... 

A new application called Sprout, launching in private beta at DEMO today, promises to make the creation of Flash applets a whole lot easier.

Sprout is a browser-based, WYSIWYG editor for Flash with an interface reminiscent of Photoshop or Dreamweaver. Designers can use it to create, publish and track Flash widgets, websites and mashups, thereby obviating the need for them to work with programmers who would cost time and money, and who might not execute designs satisfactorily.

The application itself is entirely Flash/Flex-based and won’t require account registration for first-time users (that is, once the private beta period is over). As can be seen in the screenshot to the left, the interface consists of a staging area for construction of a so-called “sprout” (don’t call it a widget!), as well as several panels for tools, components, pages, properties, and more. I found that my experience with Photoshop served me well for creating a sprout (embedded below) that displays TechCrunch feeds, since the same editing concepts are applied by both programs. That said, it would be nice if Sprout had undo capabilities and proper layering, as found in Photoshop.

While all WYSIWYG editors lack at least some of the functionality achievable through direct programming, Sprout overcomes this limitation in part by providing a library of “components” that can be integrated into a given creation. The company has lined up general components such as video, slideshows and RSS feeds in addition to components from 3rd party web services such as Meebo, Yahoo Maps, PollDaddy and Ribbit.

Sprout is marketing its release as a better way for designers to create distributable widgets. The company has partnered up with Clearspring, Gigya, and SpringWidgets to provide both easy distribution and tracking/analytics. Sprout creators can track the usage of not only entire sprouts but the elements, such as buttons, within those sprouts. They can also use the application to make changes to sprouts that have already been distributed across the web.

While Sprout’s current focus is on the widget use case, its capabilities don’t end there. Since you can create sprouts of any dimensions, there’s nothing stopping you from creating entire websites using Sprout. Its pages and linking functionality certainly lend themselves to this type of creation. And since Sprout has incorporated 3rd party services, it can also be used to create mashup pages/portals. The range of possibilities will increase when Sprout releases an SDK in the following month, allowing outside developers to add to the components library.

Sprout should be publicly available in the next few weeks. Until then, the first 200 TechCrunch readers to sign up here will gain access to its private beta. A video demonstration of Sprout is provided below, alongside the RSS feed sprout I created for TechCrunch (hosted on their demo server so it may go down).

 

Posted by brian tiong at 09:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

(* Source: Duncan Riley *) 

First the news on Googles' new platform to compete with Facebook late last year, then a whole bunch of other social networking sites (incl Myspace) then jump on the platform bangwagon, a data portability workgroup is then formed to help all these companies talk in the same language and now... Facebook pulls another rabbit from it hat.  Clever? only time will tell.

Facebook announced Friday a new JavaScript client library that will allow Facebook apps to be displayed on any website.

The client library allows users to make Facebook API calls from any web site and create Ajax Facebook applications on that website.

Wei Zhu from Facebook explains the benefits:

Since the library does not require any server-side code on your server, you can now create a Facebook application that can be hosted on any web site that serves static HTML. An application that uses this client library should be registered as an iframe type. This applies to either iframe Facebook apps that users access through the Facebook web site or apps that users access directly on the app’s own web sites. Almost all Facebook APIs are supported.

Nick O’Neill at All Facebook writes:

Want to build your own social gaming platform that resides on your own website but leverages the power of users’ Facebook relationships? Now you can! There had previously been applications that could leverage the Facebook API prior to the launch of the platform but there are some significant differences now versus before. The first significant difference is the broader access to Facebook’s core features that the platform provides.

I’m not sure anyone saw this move coming, but Facebook may have just changed the game again by essentially becoming an application host. It’s a clever move by Facebook in a year its competitors will get more serious about offering platforms themselves.

Posted by brian tiong at 10:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

(* Source: Comscore *) 

The widget space is evolving as quickly as the audience is growing.  Have a look at some numbers Comscore has put together this time round...

Comscore reports... 

MySpace.com Widgets Reach Largest U.S. Audience

In November 2007, nearly 148 million U.S. Internet users viewed widgets, representing 81 percent of the total audience. MySpace.com widgets had the widest audience, reaching more than 57 million Internet users, while Slide.com ranked second with 39.2 million viewers. Google.com has the sixth widest widget-viewing audience with more than 19 million viewers.

*Facebook.com excluded from list due to different measurement methodology

** Clearspring is a widget platform and has independent objects; both are included in its total

“Top Friends” Tops Facebook Application Rankings

The inaugural Facebook application rankings revealed that more than 20 million Facebook visitors, or 61 percent of the site’s U.S. audience, engaged with an application in November. Visitors between the ages of 18-24 were twice as likely as the average Facebook visitor to engage with applications, while those aged 25 and older were less likely than average to exhibit this behavior.

“Top Friends” by Slide was the top ranked application during the month, with more than 6.2 million engaged viewers (18.5 percent of the Facebook audience), followed by Movies by Flixster with 5.2 million (15.4 percent), and SuperPoke! by Slide with 3.6 million (10.8 percent). Slide contributed three of the ten most engaged Facebook applications in November, while RockYou! contributed two.

* Rankings based on number of people that actively engaged with the application during the course of the month, which includes interacting with the object, downloads of the object or views of the application information page. The rankings may differ from Facebook.com’s own “Most Active User” rankings, which are based on daily active users.

Posted by brian tiong at 12:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

(* Source: Dan Neumann *)

As convergence descends on the living room we are starting to see a lot of televisions designed to deliver web content over a broadband connection, bypassing a standalone PC. New models introduced by Sony, Samsung and Sharp at CES all showcased various ways of digesting online content. Of the three manufactures, Sharp’s Aquos Net offering was most the most promising. Televisions with Aquos Net include a browser by Netfront optimized for slightly lower resolutions of LCD TVs. What’s nice about the use of Netfront is that the company provides an SDK to help developers port and preview content to embedded platforms. In addition to the Netfront SDK, Sharp is providing its own SDK and developer program to support development of widgets. Sharp’s widgets are similar to desktop widgets in that they are downloaded from a gallery and are designed to be viewed while watching live TV.

I think Sharp has made some good choices with this product. By providing developer support from the outset they are likely to wind up with more content than competitors with closed delivery infrastructures. Let’s hope more manufacturers follow Sharp’s lead and, even better, that real standards emerge in the channel. It’s already a headache optimizing content for multiple browsers.  

Posted by brian tiong at 06:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

(* Source: Dan Taylor *)

Posted by brian tiong at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

(* Source: Victoria Murphy Barret *)

Since RockYou’s founding two years ago, 90 million social networkers have downloaded its applications. For this, RockYou is making more than $100,000 a month in revenues showing ads alongside its mini-applications for brands like AT&T (nyse: T - news - people ) and Sony (nyse: SNE - news - people ), as well as by plugging other developers’ mini-apps (for a fee). The pitch to advertisers: We are where the kids hang out. Yet RockYou doesn’t know much else about its customers. Facebook doesn’t share data about members’ ages, locations, education or anything else it might know.

Jia Shen, the 27-year-old co-founder of RockYou, sat down with Forbes.com recently to talk about how to make money selling snack-size software and what Google's (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) new open platform means for Facebook and MySpace.

Forbes.com: How did RockYou begin?

Jia Shen: We started two years ago noticing that everyone on MySpace was trying to “bling out” their pages. But there was no easy way to do it. We decided to put together a slide show tool. It took one week to build. I worked while I was on vacation in Japan. In one month, we had 100,000 people using it. Then in three months there were one million.

Impressive growth. But were you making any money?

None. You can’t advertise on MySpace. Facebook changed that. So now we’re like any other Web site: We make money on page views. Sony Pictures wanted to promote the film Resident Evil and used our Zombies application for a sweepstakes event.

We also advertise other applications and take a cut. Yahoo! created an application that lets you post music videos on your Facebook profile page. Yahoo! had 8,000 downloads after one month, which is pretty slow. We started promoting the application in banners above our own applications. In a single day on our network of applications, Yahoo! got 120,000 downloads.

What is your initial reaction to Google's new open platform for social networks?

We’ve been helping Google for a while on this. In theory, it should be very cool. We tested it out with an application called Emote (Editor's note: This is a collection of happy, sad, flirty smiley faces). Before all these networks required different code, and it took us three days to re-write the same application for Facebook to get it to work on Orkut. With the new standards, it took us just 30 minutes to make the same application work on Plaxo. The real test comes two months from now. How many companies will really give us real estate on their Web sites?

Will Google's open platform give a boost to less popular social networks like Orkut, Friendster and the Hi5?

Sure, if it yields them more applications, it gives people more reasons to flock to their sites. Web traffic isn’t yet a zero-sum game

Is this bad news for Facebook? Will developers spend less time on Facebook apps?

People are making real money on Facebook. So there’s risk in going elsewhere. Am I really going to spend time going after Orkut’s Brazilian audience? I’m more likely to focus on the U.S. market. Facebook is still growing nicely.

Do you worry that the social networking sites, particularly Facebook, will start launching their own applications and compete with outside developers?

It is always a worry, but something that we've lived with since day one. MySpace eventually built a competing slideshow, but we already had big penetration, with a diverse set of widgets. Facebook does do little feature creeps here and there. But everything they've done so far has been non-competitive.

What will Microsoft get from its deal with Facebook? (Microsoft announced in October a $240 million investment for a 1.6% stake in Facebook, and is serving ads on the site.)

This isn’t traditional brand advertising. But my belief is that Microsoft didn’t want only access to the ad network. Microsoft wanted to make sure no one else got Facebook. (Google was reportedly bidding.)

What were you doing before RockYou?

I came to Silicon Valley in 2000 after majoring in computer science and electrical engineering at Johns Hopkins. The first start-up I landed at failed in three months, so did the second. I thought I was the kiss of death.

But I have a short attention span, so it was fine by me. This company is changing so much I may as well be working at a different place every three months.

Posted by brian tiong at 03:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

(* Source: Kristen Nicole *)

Cruxy, the marketplace for independent artists to sell their own content, is releasing a Virtual World Widget today.

The Cruxy Virtual World Widget will work inside virtual world games such as Second Life, There.com and World of Warcraft. For you Second Life fans out there, you know that there is a lot of stuff you can do to create your own presence and turn a decent profit as well. Cruxy is banking on that drive. Their Second Life player looks like an mp3 player and can be worn by your avatar wherever they go, so you can listen to music. They’re hoping that musicians will use this as further promotion for themselves, leaving them in public Second Life places for others to take, or distributing them to only those avatars that show up at your Second Life concert. Going along with true Second Life nature, the player is fully customizable.

Cruxy’s other new releases include a multi-format social player to present audio, video or image content, a purchase-enabled widget for consumers to buy a download without leaving their current web page, and a Play this Page feature, allowing a browse view or search to be dynamically loaded into the player. A user can take that player’s code with the newly loaded playlist directly from your MySpace page. Cruxy has topped it all off with a new API that includes every component Cruxy has to offer.

Admittedly, Cruxy has come a long way since their initial launch last September. Their Virtual World widget is niche, but a good move considering the typical marketing economy within Second Life and the inevitable shift to systems such as Second Life for the future of social networking. Whether or not their other new tools will help with marketing back on the regular Web is yet to be seen, but we like that they’re advancing the promotional value of their service and extending it to users.

Posted by brian tiong at 12:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

(* Source: Valleywag.com *) 

How do these free widgets that we see on facebook make money?  Thanks Valleyway on this insider on how RockYou, facebook most successful widget targets companies that want sign ups. 

Those who can't do, teach. And those who teach, when it comes to Facebook, are charging handsomely for the privilege. RockYou, a maker of Web "widgets," those Web pages in miniature that clutter up blogs and MySpace pages, has not, apparently, figured out how to make money directly off of the Facebook apps they've created like Super Wall and Zombies. The Sequoia Capital-backed startup has, however, figured out how to make money from Facebook app developers. How? By charging them to sign up users by advertising their apps on RockYou's Facebook apps. The fee? Half a buck per user. It sounds like the perfect Ponzi scheme: As long as venture capitalists and clueless big companies are overpaying for startups based on the number of Facebook users they've signed up, it should work brilliantly. After the jump, slides from RockYou's pitch to fellow application creators.

"It's all you!" RockYou proclaims. Unless, that is, you're a Facebook app developer too inept to figure out how to get your app embraced by Facebook users.

Take, for example, Yahoo. Until RockYou came along, Yahoo's music-video app for Facebook faced resounding indifference.

RockYou has provided such amazing Facebook apps as Horoscopes and Zombies. If you've been "bitten" by a Facebook friend who wants to turn you into a zombie, now you know whom to blame -- RockYou.

Want to sign up users? It will cost you. At the largest volume discount, RockYou charges $0.50 per user signed up. That's roughly comparable to cost-per-click advertising on Google, which would be reasonable if, say, you were actually selling something, as opposed to trying to get people to sign up for your free Facebook app. And how does RockYou expect you to make up the money you've just spent on that user? Why, that's your problem. Perhaps you can charge that much for explaining to another startup how to make money on Facebook.

Full deck here (PDF).

Posted by brian tiong at 10:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

(* Source: Techcrunch *)

Some early success stories with Googles Open Social initiatives.

Erick Schonfeld says...

Ever since Plaxo joined Google’s OpenSocial platform a couple weeks ago, the number of connections on Plaxo has skyrocketed from about 200,000 to over a million. Here is a graph from Plaxo marketing VP John McCrea (nice hockey stick, John):

Posted by brian tiong at 12:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

(* Source: Techcrunch *)

By facebook allowing anybody and everybody to build widgets on their platfrom, it levels the playing field and creative ideas seem to be taking the lead.  Here is an student example.  Sounds like somebodys gonna get a job offer real soon.

Nick Gonzalez says...

Dave McClure has been teaching a class on Facebook applications at Stanford over the past semester. The class is made up of about 50 students who teamed up to produced 25 applications. We got a look at the applications earlier. Today we received word that one of them, KissMe, has crossed 1 million installs as of 6:30pm this evening. Another app, Send Hotness is likely to break 1 million in the next few days. It’s pretty amazing considering a lot of professional apps barely register.

KissMe - kiss your friends, basically by inviting them to use the application. Apparently this is the most popular application of the whole class in terms of the number of users it has (100,000).

Send Hotness - figure out your ten hottest friends; invite your friends to help you with rankings. You must invite at least ten people to see the rankings.

Posted by brian tiong at 12:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by brian tiong at 02:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

(* Source : Techcrunch *)

Erick Schonfeld says : 

Facebook just got a whole lot friendlier for music artists. With the launch of Facebook Ads, it is welcoming bands and musicians to set up their own public Facebook pages where members can sign up as fans. Alas, there will be no standalone Facebook Music service. Instead, Facebook is treating music artists just like any other brands, which can also set up their own Facebook pages, collect fans, and market to them directly.

Yet, when it comes to music artists, one of Facebook’s most popular application developers, iLike, is doing the exact same thing. Already, any band or musician can create an iLike artist page on Facebook that includes their most popular songs (filtered by what your friends like), upcoming concert dates (click on a date and see if any of your friends are going), an artist blog called iCast, related artists, and a Fan Wall where Facebook members can leave notes. In fact, half-a-million have done so. And starting today, iLike will create duplicate versions of these marketing pages for them that work with Facebook’s new brand destination pages. Right out of the gate, iLike will generate 160,000 pre-populated artists pages that the musicians or the labels themselves can modify, or leave as is.

So if you are a music artist, you now have to make a decision: Do you go with the iLike page as your main Facebook page (and take advantage of the nearly 10 million members who use the iLike app), or do you go with your own advertiser page on Facebook? Case in point: the new Facebook page for 50 Cent (shown left) had only three fans when it first went up just after midnight, compared to 1.2 million fans on his iLike page on Facebook.

Well, it turns out that iLike does not care which page artists choose to call their home. Any widget on the iLike artist page—popular songs, upcoming concerts, the iCast blog, even the iLike button—can be plopped into a Facebook artist page (also known as a canvas page). And every link in each of those widgets takes you back to the Facebook application pages that iLike controls.

This is not an unintended consequence. I asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg yesterday about the potential here for Facebook to be competing with its own app developers. He responded, “What is the effect on app developers if we are making it possible for bands to have music pages? It increases distribution because your app can be on that page.”

Fair enough. But wh