Ping, ping, ping! That's the sound made day and night by the new social media technologies rapidly proliferating around the web... and the machines are getting tired. Polling for updates to user data streams, wishing they spoke the same language and dreaming they knew which accounts belonged to the same people across different services.

Sounds like a great opportunity for an infrastructure provider, doesn't it? Enter the sexiest infrastructure provider we've seen in a long time: Gnip. Venture funded and built by exited MyBlogLog co-founder Eric Marcoullier, Gnip wants to serve as the grand central station and universal translation service for the new social web.

What Gnip Does Now

The primary service that Gnip offers at launch today is to capture user data updates from any web application and then serve up the very latest information to anyone else who requests it. Your application doesn't have to ping Flickr, YouTube, etc. etc. every few minutes and ask "have any of our users done anything on your individual service?" Now with Gnip, Flickr (a launch partner in fact) can report user data updates to Gnip, which can then pass that data along to consuming parties, along with data from all the other social media services of interest.

It's about scalability and decreasing latency to near zero. It sounds like a great idea.

What Gnip Says it Will Do Within 90 Days

The sexiest features are still in the works. Here are just a few plans that the company has disclosed so far.

Protocal switching You want to communicate instantly with an application using the IM protocol XMPP/Jabber but it only publishes and consumes RSS feeds? Gnip will stand in the middle and translate so each end of the transaction can send and recieve data in the format it wants. Hot!

Standardized metadata Different services publish user data with different titles for the various fields sometimes. That makes it hard for the robots to know what exactly is being said. Gnip is working with visionary developer Chris Messina to create a meta data standardization process, for social bookmarking activities in particular. Gnip will consume feeds from user bookmarks on any service, then make publicly available those same feeds appended with another version of the same data but in a standardized format. That's a really big deal because it makes interoperability possible.

Identity discovery Right now it's hard for services and for users to tie multiple social media accounts together from around the web. Gnip will let users provide usernames or emails and then check to see where else those identifiers are being used. That's a solid sounding idea.

All of this will be free, none of it will be public-facing. Application developers will tie into Gnip and there may be premium services available eventually, like translation of data into a particular vendor's proprietary template.

Is This Too Centralized?

Gnip's Eric Marcoullier acknowledges that the centralization here is worth questioning. Two primary concerns come up: scalability and privacy.

As far as scalability is concerned, that's the name of the game here. If Gnip can't scale with fantastic uptime then there's no service. The company has been working with Pivotal Labs, the strike force hired to fix Twitter, since Gnip started work.

When we asked Marcoullier about privacy, he emphasized that Gnip is only working with publicly available data right now. The company might venture into user authentication and private data, but that's "a whole other can of worms," he said.

No doubt Google is already indexing most of the information that Gnip will be transmitting, but we can't help but think that Gnip will be in a uniquely powerful position to do some mining of anonymized user data and social graphs. That could lead to very big money but it could also raise some concerns on the parts of users. Gnip says they aren't worried about monetization right now, they just want to build out their service and add value to the market place.

That may be the case, but we think that Gnip has a whole lot of potential to deliver huge value to the applications leveraging it, to the backers financing it and ultimately to all the users of the emerging class of social web applications. We love this kind of stuff.

MooWheel, the JavaScript connections visualization library, has been updated to version 0.2.

Updates include:

• New data format
• Text can now be hovered over, in addition to the dot
• Images can be added for each item

You can see the popular Twitter example
(thanks to Augsto Becciu, creator of TweetWheel).

Also, MooCirclePack has just been released:

MooCirclePack is another stunning visualization library that brings circle packing to JavaScript. It is great for data that can be represented by size (eg: an alternative to a bar graph), or data that can be represented amorphously.

There is a non-Ajax demo, and an Ajax one.

a widgets distributor

There are several different social media message-sending apps out there, but arguably, HelloTxt is one of the most well-known and most often utilized thanks to its support for a wide array of the most popular social sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, bebo, Pownce, Jaiku, Brightkite, and Plurk. They even support sending updates via SMS and email. However, one area where HelloTxt falls short is message scheduling. This is where services like Tweetlater help fill the void. But now there's a new app that lets you schedule social media messages, and not just tweets: Sendible.

Social Network Messaging

At the moment, Sendible supports Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, SMS, and email, and since the service is still in beta, that's a good start. They will also soon be supporting Friendster, Hi5, Orkut and Xing.

To help you fill in the "To" field of your messages, Sendible integrates with your Gmail, Yahoo, and MSN accounts in addition to the social networks it supports to retrieve your contacts. As you begin typing a friend's name, it will helpfully auto-complete the entry. Another nice feature of Sendible is that it permits SMS messages to be sent - even internationally! - for free.

Sendible's UI could improve a bit - where HelloTxt lets you check boxes next to the service to update, at Sendible you have to update each service individually by selecting it from a drop-down box. However, according to the company, the ability to update multiple services at once will be added in the future.

Updating Twitter:

Although having to select each service is a bit cumbersome, there aren't many (any?) alternative services that let you schedule updates to some of these networks the way Sendible permits. Those updates can be set up to as "once-off" (British English for "one-off," it appears) or on a recurring schedule like daily, weekly, monthly, or annually. So, yes, you could set up tweets for your friends' birthdays now and look like you never forget.

Reminders & Events

In addition, another Sendible feature is their Reminders service. Using this feature, you can set up to have reminders sent to you via SMS or email. You can even import your Facebook friends birthdays to your Sendible Calendar which lets the service send you alerts.

A News Feed lets you track upcoming reminders and scheduled messages, but sadly, this feed does not actually have an actual "feed" associated with it. That is, there's no RSS for this page. However, the company tells me that they will be adding this in the next few weeks.

Sendible's News Feed:

Over the coming months, Sendible will be adding a surveys feature and an events feature, as well. The upcoming events feature will let you create events and invite people using any message type. People responding to the events will be able to RSVP from their mobile phone, within their social network, or by email.

Advertising Pays The Bills

The site already has a monetization plan thanks to its Advertising section called "My Ads." This feature lets advertisers (or anyone) place relevant ads in the messages that are sent out by email, SMS and social networking services. The advertisers are able to target their ads by keyword, location, and message type. For those that attempt to live completely ad-free (good luck!), this may be a deal breaker, but there are certainly others who won't mind as long as the ads aren't offensive in some way. The ads are also how the SMS messages remain free, even when they're being sent overseas.

Conclusion

Considering it's a beta service, Sendible doesn't look too bad, and it's definitely useful for scheduling messages. Nearly everything the service currently lacks is said to be coming soon, so instead of dismissing it right away for not having a particular feature, you may want to check back in a few weeks and see if that feature has been added. The only major drawback so far is the lack of support for some of the newer social status services like Brightkite and Plurk. To try Sendible for yourself, you can sign up here.

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Hello...
I have not problem with your gadget... :) Not error dialog ocurred...
Milan
----- Original Message -----
To: "Google Desktop Developer Group"
<Google-Desktop-Developer@goog legroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, July 01, 2008 9:06 AM

For years the big problem with Flash-based websites is that they could not be properly indexed by search engines. Flash websites have been favored by marketers and advertisers for a long time, because of the ability to create rich, interactive Web experiences. However for most other businesses, particularly those with a lot of information on their website (let's face it, that's everyone except marketers and advertisers), Flash has been nearly an automatic 'no' for website development. That may be about to change.

Adobe announced today that it is teaming up with major search engines - notably Google and Yahoo - to "dramatically improve search results of dynamic Web content and rich Internet applications (RIAs)." In a press statement, Adobe said that it is "providing optimized Adobe Flash Player technology to Google and Yahoo! to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines."

Adobe claims that it will provide more relevant search results and rankings for RIA content. In a separate blog post, Google announced that it has launched a "Flash indexing algorithm", which will result in better search results.

Adobe admitted in its statement that up till now RIAs have been "generally difficult to fully expose to search engines because of their changing states". In other words, up till now Flash has been mostly invisible to search engines. So this news today will truly be welcomed by web developers and designers. It may even get the approval of ornery old anti-web 2.0 guru Jakob Nielsen!

There's much to admire about Adobe's web technology initiatives over the past year or so. Recent highlights include Adobe AIR (allowing developers to take web applications to the desktop and store data offline), a host of excellent third party AIR apps, an online Office Suite and new Flash-enabled Acrobat 9, a Flash API for Google Maps, publishing the Flash File Format Specs, releasing Flash 10 Beta. And now making Flash searchable.

A little while ago I would've said that browser-based web apps had a big user experience advantage over Rich Internet Apps. But now that they've achieved an (almost) holy grail in searchable Flash, that gap has lessened some more.

I just changed a inherited gadget, tested it successful in the
designer 'n created the Package :) The only thing is, when I want to
install it, I get the error message above. A reinstall of the SDK and
Desktop didn't help. On a spare clean machine is the same problem.
Please help

OS: Windows XP Home V2002 SP2

Pluribo is a Firefox plugin that displays short summaries of product reviews on Amazon.com. Pluribo scans through reviews customers on Amazon have left and automatically creates a one sentence summary that is somewhat akin to a Zagat review. While Zagat uses human editors to compile its reviews, though, Pluribo is fully automated. Right now, Pluribo only works for the electronics section of Amazon's store, but the developers are planning to expand this to the rest of Amazon's offerings soon.

Here is a typical summary that Pluribo created for a SanDisk MP3 player: "This has been on the market for a while. Although there were objections to the software, users are happy with the low price, product support, and battery. If you don't care about the software, it has potential."

Besides summarizing the reviews for a given product, Pluribo also compares those reviews to other products in the same category to see where the reviews for this item were different. Pluribo will also give more weight to reviews that were considered 'helpful' by other Amazon customers. Pluribo keeps most of this information in the background. However, when hovering over a keyword in the summary, a small pop-up will display a list of relevant phrases Amazon's customers used to describe the item, as well as some more of the statistical data Pluribo used to compute its summary.

In testing out Pluribo, it consistently displayed accurate summaries of the actual user comments - a testament to how well the developers have tuned their algorithm to at least this limited range of product categories.

Pluribo's overall execution is quite seamless and Pluribo does not slow down the load times on Amazon, as it only gets to work after the page is fully displayed.

However, Pluribo seems quite restricted when it comes to what items it will display reviews for and for which it will just display a 'coming soon' message. Right now, it only works well for MP3 players, GPS navigation systems, and digital cameras. It also seems to work best for products that have been reviewed at least 30 times.

It would be nice to see Pluribo start pulling in reviews from other sources besides Amazon's own customers. The fact that it only works as a Firefox plugin is also going to limit its appeal to technically savvy users for the time being.

Overall, Pluribo is a fun and (when it's working) useful plugin - though for the time being, its a bit too limited to be of real help. It's real potential is only going to be realized once the developers get out a version that works across all of Amazon's offerings and maybe even expands beyond Amazon to include other online stores.

We've just updated production with our most recent platform improvements.  Chief among these improvements is our support for the Bebo platform.  We've added in two integration points.  First, we've made it possible to implement any widget as a Bebo application.  To do this, click on your widget from within the dashboard, the click galleries, and go through the "Post to Bebo" process.  Second, once the application is available within Bebo, you'll notice that the actual widget will have a Bebo button on the copy panel.  If you click the Bebo button, you will be brought to the application page and you'll be able to add the application to your profile.  In addition to the Bebo integration, we've made the following changes:

1. We've made a modification to enable the start page to work with Firefox 3 on Windows.
2. We've fixed an issue with posting our widgets to the iGoogle directory.
   
3. We've made significant improvements to the UI and querying
   performance of our analytics system, ensure that critical queries are
   returned extremely quickly
4. We've enabled the "remix" functionality from within the yourminis dashboard

And we've made a number of improvements and bug fixes to individual widgets and to the platform overall.  Let us know your thoughts, on the Bebo integration and on anything else you see in the platform...

Collaborative Filtering (Wikipedia definition) is a mechanism used to filter large amounts of information by spreading the process of filtering among a large group of people. Unlike mainstream media where there is either one or very few editors setting guidelines, the collaboratively filtered social web can have infinitely many editors and gets better as you increase the number of participants.

There are two basic principles involved in Collaborative Filtering.

1. The Wisdom of Crowds and Law of Large Numbers suggest that as communities grow, not only does a large (diverse, independent, etc.) community make better decisions than a handful of editors, but the larger a community gets, the better its decisions will be. Therefore, we can hypothetically create a Collaboratively Filtered newspaper, television channel, radio station, etc., which would be better (for the community) rather than any other arbitrarily selected medium. In fact, as we will see, services like Digg, YouTube, and Last.fm, are trying to do exactly that - (CF) based media outlets.

2. The second principle of Collaborative Filtering suggests that in any such large community, with enough data on individual participants and on how the individual participants collaborate or correlate with each other, we can make predictions about what these users will like in the future based on what their tastes have been in the past, i.e. develop a collaboratively filtered recommendation engine. This, of course, relies on the fact that people's interests, preferences, and ideologies don't change too drastically over time.

The two aspects of the (CF) system result in two very different and important results.

The first gives you new, interesting, entertaining, and newsworthy information as judged by the community (in a way this is content that is the average of the interests of the entire community) and a good example of this is Digg's front page. Not all the content will be directly relevant to your tastes and in fact some of it will be completely irrelevant to you. However, as the community grows and becomes more diverse and independent, the average news story promoted to the front page will be of interest to the average community member. Not satisfied with averages? This is where the second aspect comes into place.

The second aspect of the (CF) system collects information on what kind of content and commentary you like and dislike, and based on your submission and voting habits, it does user-data-profiling. This user profile helps the site recommend content that has been submitted by users (or from sources) you generally agree with and find interesting, as well as topics that you usually vote up and tend to comment on. What this means is that by collecting enough information on how you interact with the site and with other users, the (CF) system can recommend content to you. The system finds the content and deliver it to you rather than it requiring you to scout for it. Furthermore, the more you use the recommendation system and vote up or down, the better it becomes with its recommendations.

The important thing, one that not many social sites realize, is that a (CF) system that doesn't automatically match content to your preferences, is inherently flawed. The reason for this is simple: Unless you can achieve perfect diversity and independence of opinion, one point of view will always dominate another on a particular platform. The dominant point of view on the social web is a left-leaning one, and without the ability to get the most appropriate pieces of content to the people that care most about them, the right-wing point of view gets buried almost every time.

A perfect example of this was the Ron Paul supporters and the ease with which they were able to manipulate the social news sites. Now if you could match the right-wing viewpoint to the right-wingers, and the left-wing viewpoint to the left-wingers, and get both points of views across to people that are interested in healthy debate rather than partisan politics, you're getting closer to the ideal system. A filtering system with preference-based recommendations, in essence, is the future of the social web.

Who is using what system?

The (CF) system is without a doubt the lifeblood of the social web. Even though different platforms apply it to varying extents, the system is still there at the core, and the social web would look more like rush hour in downtown Lahore if the community wasn't actively policing the traffic.

Social News

In the social news space, Digg and Propeller just use the system insofar as the front page is concerned (although Digg is set to release their recommendation engine this week). Once the content is promoted to the front page, the system's job is done. The system works in that you get rid of spam and unoriginal thought, but it isn't the best because it relies on averages rather than direct preferences of each participant. While these sites try to catch up and develop recommendation engines of their own, Reddit and StumbleUpon have leapfrogged them for a while now by having recommendation engines in place. These two sites also have similar concepts of a community front page (based on the average interests of the average community member) but they enhance your experience and incentivize increased participation by using your history of likes and dislikes to deliver the most high-quality and most relevant content to you. Furthermore, the normalization of Reddit's front page shown how a one-front-page-for-all approach forces conformity and dilutes the individual experience, whereas normalization ensures that each user controls how content is distributed to him or her.

Ultimately, even though there are some sites with little or no filtering (Slashdot, Fark, etc.), sites that use their (CF) based recommendation engines will continue to diminish the importance of active filtering from upcoming submission queues and improve the quality of user experience on an individual level.

Video Streaming and Sharing

Online video sites hosting and sharing sites are not much different. Site's like YouTube have multiple filtering mechanisms that often perform the same functions without requiring votes per se. Viewability, for example, is determined by:

1. Number of people currently watching a video

2. Number of comments on a video

3. User ratings and favorites.

The problem with impressions-based system (like the one used by now understandably dead content aggregator Spotplex) is that just because you viewed something or commented on something doesn't mean that it's good. In fact, there are dozens of YouTube videos that I click on, don't like them and then close the window (I see other people writing negative comments in poor English but I doubt that helps either). Some other sites like Break and Funny or Die use a StumbleUpon-like up/down voting system to determine what gets promoted to the front page. Again, while there are options to view similar/related videos and more videos from a user you like, there is no recommendation system using your rating and favoriting habits (and tags you like).

Blogging and Microblogging

For the most part, blogs use a combination of most viewed, most linked, most commented, and highest rated, as mechanisms for displaying content that you might like. While this is a better idea than letting people go through trial and error, it doesn't ensure that every visitor will be happy with what they see. For example, two very different posts on two entirely different topics can be the most viewed posts on your blog, and I might like one and not like another. At the same time, one has to wonder, at what point is it economical or time-efficient to start monitoring each individual user?

StumbleUpon solves this problem for the 'big guys' by letting you StumbleThru one site for the content that you might like the most. The feature, however, is not available for all sites yet.

Most Microblogging sites, unfortunately, have no filtering system at all. The signal to noise ratio debate rages on with respect to Twitter and its ilk. FriendFeed, however, launched a rudimentary recommendation feature that simple displays the top 'liked' and commented links.

Photo Hosting and Sharing

When I was thinking about the concept of (CF) systems, photo-sites like Flickr and Photobucket weren't even on my radar. Part of the reason for this is how most people I know use these sites, i.e., primarily for hosting and sometimes for finding creative commons images for embedding on their sites. I was, however, quite pleasantly surprised to see that Flickr has gone a long way to help people explore and discover excellent photography.

The feature that most people are probably familiar with is Interestingness. The feature is quite robust. It takes into account things like where the referral traffic to the image is coming from, who is commenting on it and when, who marks it as a favorite and how many people like it, among other more nuanced things. But in addition to that, the site also has other great features such as exploring based on geotagging on a map of the world, popular tags, subject-based and quality-based groups, camera finder, and most recent uploads.

The only thing left to add is a 'photos you might like' based on photos you have liked and commented on.

Music Streaming and Discovery

The best implementations of a Collaborative Filtering (CF) system along with a preference based recommendation/discovery system that I have seen are always on music streaming and discovery sites. The implementation on Last.fm for example, is almost perfect in my opinion. First of all, whether you use their online streaming widget or use their desktop software, they monitor every single song you listen to and aggregate that data. They also track how artists jump on and fall off your radar on a week to week basis. They use that data to make specific recommendations and automatically create a radio station for you that plays Last.fm's recommendations for you based on what you like.

While that in itself is more than enough, they don't stop there. They have another radio station for you that plays songs you usually like to listen, they show you what the entire Last.fm community is generally listening to, what your friends are listening to, and what your friends are recommending. It is a very robust system for aggregation, filtering, and recommendation. Here's how the recommendation engine works:

As you can see, they look at the musicians I listen to a lot and then recommend people that are either similar in sound or people who were influencers of or influenced by my favorites. These are followed by recommendations from friends and music-based groups on the site.

So, collaboratively filter and recommend or die?

These are only some of the major players that have embraced (CF) and personalized recommendations - Netflix and Amazon come to mind among others. As you can see from above, it is certainly possible to have a good collaborative filtering system without a recommendation engine (as seen in Flickr). It is optimal, however, for the users (because their experience is better) and your site (because users will participate more often and generally be happy with your product) if you throw in some recommendation system a-la Last.fm, the most robust of the lot by far.

This is a guest post by Muhammad Saleem, a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites. You can follow Muhammad on Twitter.

Introducing the Amazon.com search bar, a simple and easy way to find what your looking for on Amazon

Posted by Kathy Walrath, Technical Writer



Name: Olympics Countdown Gadget
Author: Kamal Singh
Description: Can't wait for the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games? Then the Olympics Countdown Gadget is right for you.

More information | Download gadget

Each week this blog features a recently added Google Desktop gadget that looks promising. If you'd like to see all new Desktop gadgets as they're published, subscribe to the RSS feed.

Today, Google announced that it is rebranding DoubClick's Performics Affiliate as the Google Affiliate Network.  Google acquired DoubleClick in March 2008 for $3.1 Billion. The Google Affiliate Network is not yet integrated into Google's AdSense and will continue to be hosted at ConnectCommerce.com for the time being. Companies currently featured on the network include Target, Kohls.com, Citibank, Circuit City, Zazzle, Bank of America, Verizon, and Barnes & Noble.

It's interesting that Google seems to feel enough pressure to only half-heartedly rebrand Performics. While the login page is very much in line with Google's other products, it only redirects users to the old Performics page. Also, under its AdSense banner, Google is already offering a number of pay-per-action options (though at least in name, this is still a beta).

Google is clearly trying to expand its advertising portfolio both for publishers and advertisers. Chances are that Google will integrate the Affiliate network into AdSense in the long run. Given the synergies between the two, it does seem strange, though, that Google would not be doing this already. But then, Google does often seem to take a rather long time to integrate its acquisitions (just think GrandCentral of Jaiku).

Google is only slowly opening up the Affiliate Network to new publishers. Those interested in signing up are currently being forwarded to an application form.

Hello I was wondering whether anyone can assist me with making this
compatible on a Mac. I have read through writing a Cross-Browser
gadget and made modifications such as changing .text to responseText
but to no avail. Here is the code that works on a PC.

// ---------------------- This file contains the parsing

[bcc: gadget developer(s)]
New gadgets have been submitted!
If you have feedback about these gadgets, please post it to the group by
replying to this message. Your feedback will help developers build better
gadgets.
DISCLAIMER: Google has not tested or verified the features or security of these
gadgets. Please direct all questions to the authors.

We talked about how CSS variables are next a few months back, and now they are here!

WebKit now has an experimental implementation of CSS variables:

You can test this feature using a WebKit nightly

Test cases

Once again, via Dylan Schiemann.

Tom Robinson has built a useful utility, JSON Diff, which gives you a graphical look at the difference.

Changed portions are displayed in yellow. Additions are displayed in green. Deletions are displayed in red.

The visualization is live itself, so you can move around the nodes using the triangles.

Gareth Heyes has written a JavaScript protocol fuzzer which has the goal of "producing every variation of javascript execution from links."

If you check out the demo you see all of the options available to fuzz:

Number of characters - This inserts between 1 and 10 characters in the chosen position

Character position - The string position of the characters chosen. E.g. if you choose “0″ then the “j” will be replaced or appended.

Replace character - Simply replaces the character rather than add characters to the position.

Url encode - Urlencodes the vector before outputting the link.

HTML hex entity encode - Instead of output the character, it uses the HTML hex entity instead.

HTML dec entity encode - Instead of output the character, it uses the HTML decimal entity instead.

Semi-colons - Adds a semi-colon if HTML entities are used.

Random zero fill - Adds a bunch of random zeros if entities are used.

Start from - Is the starting character to begin the fuzz. E.g “0″ is null

He has also found interesting results in various browsers such as: jav�ascript: working, meaning that this would work:

I wanted to make some new post series in Widgets Lab and a good way to break the ice after having covered much if not all of the big picture in the widget market is to do quick interviews to the CEO´s  behind the companies . our theme is of course widget Startups and these quick interview will be focused in clearing up the story and profile of those companies.

MuseStorm

Founded all the way back in 2005 in Tel Avi, Israel. Musestorm is the perfect company to check out to understand how much the  Market of Widgets have changed in less than 3 years. from being merely a javascript widget developer, to a widget developer and provider to now that is the widget startup with the fullest scope. they cover from the development, to the promotion, to the management, to the analytics. they provide a end to end all solution. and if someone disagrees with that. then at least i can be agreed that it is what they strongly AIM for.

 

The Modern Musestorm started with the so called “MuseStorm Engagement Platform” .not only talking about user engagement as the direct force that should connect development and delivery.

Or how they call it:

“Our technology advantage is the result of the MuseStorm Engagement Platform.  Inside you’ll find not only the MuseStorm Widget Studio but also modules for Total Analytics and for Intelligent Delivery.  The MuseStorm Engagement Platform is mature technology that has been tested on live deployments with agencies, brand marketers, and entertainment companies.  The platform itself meets or exceeds enterprise standards for reliability and scalability. Agencies and brand marketers trust MuseStorm to run their campaigns based on widgets and social applications with an expected reach of 5 million to 100 million users.” 

1.-Development Suite

A widget editor where to develop the widget

2.-Metrics

Management tools to wrap up the widget in tracking analytics

3.-High Spread Sharing

Capacity to port the widget developed to different platform without having to Redo any code.

Of course that the magic is in between those lines. it may not sound that impressive at this stage of 2008 but that is because now the other have also improved the offering to be at the same level.

: So you got a widget startup can do every thing for you:

= “A Widget Agency”

And that is what begs the questions:

"What is the difference?” , “why should i care?”

Ori Soen, Founder and CEO of MuseStorm

“Ori Soen founded MuseStorm in 2005. Apart from managing day-to-day operations, as CEO, he is focused on business development, sales, and building customer acceptance for MuseStorm as the professional way to widget.  A serial entrepreneur, prior to co-founding MuseStorm, Mr. Soen held executive positions at Mercury Interactive before and after its acquisition by HP.  Prior to that, he was involved in building two mobile companies:  Followap (acquired by NeuStar) and MobileSpear.  Ori holds degrees in Computer Science and Business from Hebrew University. A citizen of Israel, he now makes his home in Sunnyvale, CA with his wife and two daughters.”

 

Q&A

Avatar:

When Widgets Lab started to cover news about Musestorm back in 2006. musestorm direction was in close path to what now it is Widgetbox. What essentially changed while developing the company to divert from that and engage into making musestorm a "Widget Agency" instead?

Ori Soen:

Well, "widget agency" is how you characterize us … Starting in late 2006, it became apparent that the climate was changing and that companies without explicit business models were not going to succeed. At that point in time, we shifted from a company focused on consumers and their self-expression needs - in other words, a business to consumer play - to one that is focused on the needs of professional marketers - a business to business play. Our focus on marketers and agencies has been paying off.

A lot of the background in Musestorm core team is experience in the mobile world, starting with you. however musestorm didn’t tried to set into covering mobiles while it grew, and why start with the iphone?.

Ori:

Our extensive experience in the mobile space is exactly the reason why we haven’t invested heavily in mobile widgets before the iPhone. We are really focused on the user experience and until recently we did not believe mobile platforms provided the functionality we were looking for. iPhone has changed the game and will lead to a powerful revolution in mobile handset design and functionality - which is great.

We had more and more customers interested in support for the iPhone, so it was a natural step to extend the platform to support it.

It is obvious, that the Mobile web is the greener land to conquer. now that there are a lot of Widget Companies and where pretty much your only competition in the same level is Plusmo. is there any Road Map, even if tentative on what comes after the iphone for musestorm?.

Ori:

Generally, we plan to extend our iPhone support and are working on prototypes for a couple of other mobile platforms. Unfortunately as this space is competitive and other widget companies have the habit of copying everything we do, I can’t go into specifics. I can, however, tell you that we are listening carefully to our customers and what they want and are also working closely with mobile platform owners to rolls out some very cool functionality.

Plusmo, by the way, is focused on consumers while we are focused on marketers, agencies and entertainment companies, so we really don’t consider them competitors.

We already know that the Desktop is blurring with the web thanks to the new RIA scenarios. while Musestorm is not focused into High End Widgets. what is your posture on the possible outcomes of RIA Widgets?

Ori:

We are keeping a close eye on both Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight, the two technologies that are leading the charge of “blurring the web and the desktop.” You have to keep in mind that both technologies require users to download a plug-in and are not commonplace today. So while they hold a lot of promise, it’s still going to be a while before these technologies have mass reach.

Widget Metrics is what has been powering the whole push of Widget Advertising and Marketing that really made Widgets truly stand out the past year. the combinations of those 3 elements and how to manage them is part of the dilemma widgets now face. how musestorm helps in this and how does this compare to gigya and the new clearspring initiatives?

Ori:

Great question. Let me see if I can drill down more and focus in on what you’re really asking. Today, I distinguish between widgets as part of a distributed branding strategy and widgets which are yet-another-vehicle-for advertising. As I suspect you can tell, I don’t believe that widgets as YAVF advertising are very compelling unless or until you build a widget that has compelling functionality you can’t get elsewhere on the web. In other words, make your widget a mini-application or provide exclusive content and then and only then can you use that widget as a carrier for advertising. Most of the time, it makes more sense to craft your widget around the brand assets you already have, but do so in a way that your consumer will find engaging. The only way to figure out whether your consumer is engaging with the content inside the widget is to get out of what I call "black box" mode and understand how consumers are engaging with the various parts of your widget, piece by piece. This is where MuseStorm excels.

Our platform - the MuseStorm Engagement Platform - was built from the ground up to give professional marketers the power to see into the guts of the widget and understand exactly how consumers are engaging with the widget, what content turns them on, what content turns them off, to trend that data over time. Clients like CBS Mobile/CBS Interactive are using this analytics that we provide to manage their widgets to maximize the viral velocity of their campaigns. They can immediately tell when a particular video is starting to wear out and know when it’s time to introduce a new episode. This is powerful stuff and enables customers to essentially establish an ongoing relationship with the consumer through the widget.

In short, MuseStorm believes that widget analytics, widget-based marketing, and campaign management are intertwined. We empower our clients to understand what’s going on inside the widget and to iterate very quickly so as to optimize results in real time.

I had a question/opinion in the comments in a previous musestorm post for you, that would be interesting to know your take on. even if Marcia already had a go at it:

  "honestly, would like to hear your take from a cost/benefit   perspective. 
I know its difficult to comparatively review these   platforms, 
but who are they really geared towards?
 
   No one I know wants to use utilities like sprout which try to cannibalize 
good development, it offends larger clients and agencies  and puts a really 
impersonal message out there.
 
  MuseStorm is very interesting in terms of self publishing 
(tested   beta 2 days ago) for those who are just testing the waters, 
in very  short campaigns — really lacks scalability due to limits of their 
 platform.
Maybe this is a fundamental platform argument.. "

Widget Platforms are geared towards professional marketers who need to field multiple widget-based campaigns. The cost/benefit derives from both time and money saved.

Time - because the companies we work with can create widgets and social applications more quickly using a platform than they can by building each widget as a "one off."

Money - because of what you get with a platform - analytics, drag-and-drop components, cross-platform implementation and support. When you spend money on a platform, you do not need to hire outside developers to do the following:

- build custom analytics and multiple report sets and then evolve those analytics overtime to keep up with changes in the market

- build back-end functionality necessary to power drag-and-drop components such as comments. For example, MuseStorm provides a component that allows consumers to comment within a widget or social application. On the back end, we do moderation and language filtering … functionality our customers would have to invest in custom programming. There are numerous examples like this.

- integration into each and every social networking or mobile platform. For example, to develop a true Facebook application, you need to hire programmers skilled in FBML. We take care of this for our customers, enabling them to focus their time and money on the creative work product versus on the technology heavy lifting.

In terms of our business model, we agree that Sprout and some of the other low-end competitors probably will not make it, in the sense that they are trying to cannibalize what agencies already offer.

In terms of making tools available for consumers as opposed to companies, what one commenter referred to as "tools for self publishing" - that’s not our focus. The only tool we make available on a free or trial basis is for the iPhone, to develop a widget for this platform ONLY. We did this for a very specific reason … which is to give professional marketers an opportunity to go hands-on with the MuseStorm Engagement Platform in a fast and easy way. We’re not certain if this is an initiative we want or need to continue with because the message is confusing - we’re not in the consumer business and we don’t want to confuse the waters by making offers that might be construed in a way that suggests we are.

Just 6 months ago, explaining what Musestorm did was a lot easier than it is now and there was no Gigya or Sprout visible in the scene either. Many seem confused by the latest widget companies, so i want you to take the opportunity to clear out what are the differences of musestorm with the rest?

Ori:

What makes us different and better than our competition is four simple things:

Widgets that go more places for maximum reach.

Cross-Platform Widgets. With MuseStorm, agencies and marketers can create a widget once and then morph that widget across platforms (including true Facebook application) as needed to maximize your reach and the overall performance of your viral marketing campaign. In contrast, ClearSpring, Gigya and Sprout only support Flash-based widgets.

Accountability with detailed reporting on all touchpoints.

Engagement Matters. Go beyond distribution metrics and understand how people are interacting with your widget or social application. Essential to ensure your campaign reaches viral velocity and to avoid wear out. With other solutions you have to actually program your own interaction events tracking.

Convenience + Control right down to the pixel.

MuseStorm Widget Studio is a complete production environment. The environment looks and feels a lot like PowerPoint and is designed to give you complete, pixel-perfect control over how your widget looks, feels, and behaves. All from the privacy and convenience of your desktop, 24 x 7.

Proven by blue-chip marketers.

Since 2005, MuseStorm has been partnering with brands like CBS Mobile, DefJam Recording, Disturbing tha Peace records, Island Records, Simon & Schuster and many agencies. Companies choose MuseStorm to handle all the technology heavy lifting involved in producing, managing, analyzing, and delivering widgets to viral- and social-networking environments.

If constant change is a landmark of the technology sector. Widgets should be the niche in the web that has changed the most. from being in the background, from being a mere Aid or decoration to being true utilities, services and sources of revenue.

The fragmentation of the business of Widgets is already very visible and that is supposed to be where you guys come into. why do any developer or media outlet should consider widgets?. what can they provide that you cannot find on other elements in the web?.

Ori:

Here at MuseStorm, we believe that widgets and social applications are the backbone of any marketers’ distributed branding strategy. As such, it’s not so much that widgets deliver "new functionality" you can’t get elsewhere - but the fact that widgets deliver that functionality where the target audience resides when online. The fact of the matter is that many people do not start or end their days staring at a Google start page or Yahoo’s home page any longer. They start and end their days on Facebook, MySpace, or on their iPhones or other mobile phone. That changes the marketing equation. Smart marketers know they have to bring the brand to where their customers are… which is what widgets and social applications do better than any other medium.

To finish up. what is the most exciting new development in widgets for you?. what do you see as the next big thing for widgets?

We love the new developments in the mobile space. iPhone, Google Android, Nokia initiatives, Yahoo! Mobile widgets, Opera mini widgets and more. The mobile widget space is going to explode and we are looking to be a major force there!

To learn more about MuseStorm and the MuseStorm Engagement Platform please go to our site at http://www.musestorm.com

Closing in

A little nice of perspective and context does not hurt anybody so i want to thank Ori Soen for the graciousness, This was our first  edition of the “The Widget Interview” . something you should expect to read here at widgets lab on fairly regular schedule.

If you want to read some of the news highlights from newstorm covered before at WidgetsLab you only got to take a look at these:

MuseStorm.com All sorts of widgets. first note on Musestorm (nov 2006)

Musestorm: Widget based content engagement platform (sep 2007)

Musestorm adds Bebo App Platform Support, Updates Engagement Platform (april 2008)

MuseStorm bring their Widget Agency approach to the iPhone and look to the future. (may 2008)

http://www.musestorm.com

*If you would like to be profiled in The Widget Interview, just write to me and let me know*

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TimeLiner is a small widget you can add to your blog or website for playing audio or video. Ok... Nothing special here (except it's a reallly goood flash-player) It acts like a forum, but with a little twist; the messages that visitor post are linked to the corresponding timeline in a (flv)movie or mp3-file. When someone plays back the file reactions will appear at the timeline they were stored at... It's a kind of 3D-forum!. Imagine: you're watching some video on a blog, and at 1:21, just for a second, a flying saucer appears..... Now, that's probably something you'd really like to respond to, so you press "react to this timeline" and add your reaction: "Hey did you see that ?? ". If another visitor plays this movie and reaches 1:21 your message will appear underneath the player!

About NextBus Widget Interface Brings the power of the NextBus prediction system to your Dashboard. Simply select your settings, and see updated predictions with the touch of a button.

About BART Planner Real-time display of train times and routes for Bay Area Rapid Transit. Don’t waste time waiting for your BART train, this easy-to-use widget remembers your favorite stations and gives you up-to-date train info. Features: - Real-time train data - Swap origin/destination for quick return trips - Collapsible display - Small footprint and file size - Integrated version checker

About Disky A handy widget for monitoring all your internal and external disk drives. You can easily configure it to show the disk activity, compare free and used spaces of your hard disks in two modes (relative and absolute) and eject them instantly. Resize it and choose its color to fit perfectly in the dashboard. Includes French localizations.

About Spore Countdown Timer Use this widget to countdown towards our favorite game, Spore. Enjoy.

About Ex’pression College News and Events RSS News and Events RSS reader from Ex’pression College for Digital Arts.

About Countdown to Halloween A simple countdown to Halloween in the USA. Nightmare before Christmas image property of Disney.

A lot of you have asked for a way to fully integrate search within Netvibes. Today, we are really happy to bring you a new feature that will allow you to perform complete Google searches within your Netvibes page and have the results appear right in its own new tab. Since the beginning of the Web, people have constantly debated between starting via a homepage or by going to a search portal. Now you can have the best of both worlds, by accessing the full power of search without ever having to leave your personalized Netvibes page. Your widgets, feeds and friends will always be close at hand while you perform life's daily searches, and you can save your results for as long as you'd like.

Nothing to do on your end: the search field will appear automatically on your page starting today. And since Netvibes is, as always, fully customizable you'll be able to select a few options to make this new tool your very own!

Let me walk you through those easily configurable options:

Position

The search field can be positioned above or below the page title or you can even hide it if you don't like the feature. But if you love this option as much as we do and replace your page title with a simple search bar, just uncheck the “display title” option.

Results

Every search result will by default open in a new Netvibes tab so you can easily compare, track or save different results. If you don't like this behavior you can configure it so the results always show in the same tab. Now you can keep you search within your netvibes and switch, with a single click, between all result categories: Video, Blog, News, Images, Books…

Universes

The search engine can also be displayed on your public page but you'll have to manually activate it since we didn't want to break your existing designs. You can even create a tab which does a search on your name or company like I did on our own: http://www.netvibes.com/netvibes

Localization

Searches are performed on Google.com but we respect the local content configured on your Netvibes so you'll always have results which suits the best your country. In the future we'll add more search engines so you'll be able to switch between them to have your prefered local provider.

Lastly, we wanted to give a quick shout out to the Google Search team. They’ve just been great to work with. Merci! ;-)

We'd love to hear your feedback, to please leave some thoughts in the comments once you play with our new features.

Crude Oil Price Graph

Introducing the USA Government and ebay.com search bar gadget. Access information on United States of America, its government, and programs and services. Got a beef! contact your local Congress or Senate representative through email directly.

Introducing the Government of Canada and ebay.ca search bar gadget. Access information on Canada, its government, and federal programs and services in english or french. Got a beef! contact your local MP through email directly.

Introducing the Goverment of Canada and ebay.ca search bar gadget. Access information on Canada, its government, and federal programs and services in english or french. Got a beef! contact your local MP through email directly.

I put the BBC Glastonbury festival widget in my iGoogle page the other day. I like trying these things out, and this widget carried the festival webcam streams. It was quite a nice widget.
I just noticed a Twitter that the webcam's were down, so I thought I'd go and check how the widget looked with no content. (This is how it looks in total):

Hmm, well that's graceful, isn't it? I just can't imagine how taking a content stream out of a widget can cause such catastrophic degredation. It's a bit of an insult to anyone who'd bothered to take a copy of the widget.

Posted by Shawn Shen, Developer Programs

A few weeks ago we posted a survey to collect feedback from the community to help improve the OpenSocial ecosystem. We are very grateful for all the responses and also appreciate your continued involvement in shaping OpenSocial. I'd like to share a brief summary of our findings.



Preferred Timeline & Location of Future OpenSocial events

Across the globe more than 65% of respondents prefer OpenSocial events sooner than later (i.e. July through October '08; see graph).



All regions are well represented with these regional preferences: North America (45%), Asia-Pacific (45%), Europe/the Middle East/Africa (34%) and South America (21%). This is not surprising, as there have been a wide variety of OpenSocial hackathons and events in the US, UK, the Netherlands, Argentina, Brazil, Japan, China, and in Korea. Google, too, recently had a very successful Beijing Hackathon, hot on the heels of Google Developer Day China. This month, we also held OpenSocial codelabs and seminars in Japan, Taiwan, Australia, Mexico, and Brazil, with many more planned in September & October as part of Google Developer Days 2008). So stay tuned worldwide for many more events from the larger OpenSocial community.



Preferred Event Formats

More than 70% of the respondents are interested in a general OpenSocial summit or summit combined with a hackathon (see graph), indicating developers' preference for active engagement in and frequent updates about OpenSocial's evolution.




Popular Containers

Early adopters that are in either full production or sandbox, namely hi5, MySpace, orkut and iGoogle, made this list, though the list is augmented by 13 other containers, showing the breadth of OpenSocial's reach.



Preferred Language

95% of the respondents use JavaScript while 56% and 31% prefer PHP and Java respectively, with Ruby and Python not far behind.



Documentation

While 54% of the respondents were either satisfied or very satisfied with OpenSocial documentation, 28% reported being "not sure" and 19% felt dissatisfied, which indicates there remains room for continued improvement in detailed API documentation, production-ready sample code, feature specific tutorials, Shindig documentation, cross-container reference, and wiki-enabled content sharing. We are currently rolling out OpenSocial wiki resources, and we will provide more updates as we continue to improve our documentation.



An extra hand

More than 80% of the respondents use the OpenSocial group for help, and more than 50% receive help from the orkut developer forum while 19%, 14% and 13% of the respondents also use hi5, iGoogle, and MySpace forums respectively.

Once again, in pursuing our common goal to make the web more open and social, I'd like to thank the developer community for your continued support, unbounded energy and unrelenting enthusiasm, as evidenced in this comment from a developer in Korea, "Go! Go! Go! Opensocial!"

Privacy is at the core of Facebook.

Because we provide users with rich privacy controls and respect their choices, users feel safe using Facebook to share their information with their friends. By opening up Facebook through Platform, developers have the opportunity to innovate on top of this information. In exchange, developers commit to treating user information with the same respect that users expect of Facebook. Our Developer Terms of Service strictly limit use of user data and serves as guidelines to these expectations.

Facebook works to help clarify standards and maintain user trust in applications available on Facebook through technical and manual means. Recently, we suspended Top Friends, one of the most popular applications on Facebook. This application violated user privacy by displaying some profile data to people who should not otherwise have been able to see the information. Though the application developer insists that this violation was not intentional, the seriousness of the violation required us to take immediate action.

We don’t take lightly that millions of users lost their access to this application. Because so many people interact with Top Friends on a daily basis, our immediate action to suspend the application was vital in protecting users and assuring them that their confidence in Facebook and the applications on Facebook Platform are well-placed.

This situation demonstrates the importance for continued vigilance on our part and the part of developers who build applications on Facebook Platform. In the coming weeks, we will be increasing our efforts to educate the developer community about our specific policies and the policies and programs developers need to put in place in order to uphold the guiding principles of Platform.

Facebook Platform is a tremendous opportunity for us as a community to provide great social applications to the world. All of us – Facebook, developers, and users – share a joint responsibility to ensure respectful and transparent experiences on Facebook.

Promote your auctions with simple animated slideshow widget.

This widget comes from classifiedflyerads.com and is a FREE part of their membership package.

There are two varieties of widget. One similar to the above widget for sidebars and a horizontal version that can be used for other locations such as headers or posts.

This is an iFrame coded widget and is completely customizable (code editing)

You can check out both widgets here.

There is a thread going on secure cross domain requests. Microsoft came out with a paper saying that the W3C standard isn't secure, and pushing the Microsoft XDR spec:

A few proposals and implementations exist like XDomainRequest in IE8, JSONRequest and the W3C’s Web Applications Working Group’s Cross Site XMLHttpRequest (CS-XHR) draft specification, which combines an Access control framework with XMLHttpRequest or other features. While XDomainRequest is focused on enabling anonymous access of third party public data, Cross Site XMLHttpRequest has added functionality and consequently enables a broader set of scenarios that may appeal to the developer who may choose to use cross domain authentication and access control among other features. As can be expected with securing a large cross section of cross domain scenarios, a number of concerns have been identified with the CS-XHR draft by the web development community, the IE team members and members of the Web Apps Working Group. For a list of our recent feedback on security on CS-XHR and our take on important security principles in cross domain, please read our Security Whitepaper on Cross Domain. The paper also covers best practices and guidance for developers who will choose to build on the current draft if it’s supported by a future browser.

The community quickly jumped on this in the comments, and beyond.

Anne van Kesteren said:

After half a year of waiting Microsoft finally posted their feedback on Access Control for Cross-Site Requests and specifically the way XMLHttpRequest Level 2 works with that. Microsoft blogged about this event. I suggest people read this rebuttal from Jonas on the paper Microsoft published. To be clear, while the specifications are not entirely finalized nobody has so far put forward a viable attack scenario that does not already apply when these technologies are not supported by user agents.

(Related: Working group fun and “Concerns” raised about W3C Access Control spec have been little more than FUD.)

As linked from Anne, Jonas posted nice feedback:

I'll start with a mini FAQ to avoid repeating myself below:

Why is the PEP in the client rather than the server?

In order to protect legacy servers some of the enforcement will have to live in the client. We can't expect existing legacy servers to all of a sudden enforce something that they haven't before.

In fact, even XDR using client side PEP. It's the client that looks for the XDomainRequest header and denies the webpage access to the data if the header is not there.

In fact, Access-Control does allow full PEP on the server if it so chooses by providing an "Origin" header.

Is Access-Control designed with "Security by design"

Yes. In many ways. For example Access-Control does not allow any requests to be sent to the server that aren't already possible today, unless the server explicitly asks to receive them.

Additionally Access-Control sets up a safe way to transfer private data. This prevents sites from having to invent their own which risks them inventing something less safe.

Thirdly, Access-Control integrates well with the existing HTTP architecture of the web by supporting REST apis and the Content-Type header. This allows existing security infrastructure to inspect and understand Access-Control requests properly.

What about DNS rebinding attacks.

Even with DNS rebinding attacks Access-Control is designed not to allow any requests which are not possible already in todays web platform as implemented in all major browsers.

Especially the last point is something that seems to have been misunderstood at Microsoft. It is not the case that DNS rebinding attacks affect Access-Control any different than it affects the rest of the web platform.

There are many packaged and ready to use Silverlight Video players already out and you can even generate one from Expression Studio quite easily. but that is for basic video players. if you want something with more style, you have to build your own.

Or you could use a Open Source Video Player for Silverlight that will evolve and stay free and that you are also allowed to modify at ease to your use or add it to the use of all if you want to contribute to the project.

That is the premise behind Silverlight 2 Video Player. the video player is now fully featured and works like a charm under Silverlight 2.0. the style  looks to be pretty much a reproduction of the Vimeo player that is so in Vogue (flickr video ripped off the design too). i agree with that. vimeo is the prettiest video player d