Happy Holidays, the WidgGeek Way

DURING the holiday season, it's important to remember all the little things that count.

Despite the often harsh critique on widgets this blog has, we're thankful for them. Even though we expect a lot, we're respectful of, and even glad for, their lighter roots.

So in honor of that, here's some of the zaniest, kitchiest, most absurd and fun holiday widgets.

Happy holidays, from WidgetWatch!

1. Leg Lamp: For all the fans of TNT's never-ending loop of the holiday classic.

2. Snow Line: Help Santa collect all the presents so he can distribute them to all the good little boys and girls.

3. Christmas dinner: Collect turkeys and puddings to help prepare a delicious, though certainly not nutritious, holiday feast.

4. Countdown: There are a million of these out there, this is my pick for cheesiest. For your dashboard.

5. Festive Lights: Get your desktop festive. It's not a holiday till your dock sparkles with Christmas spirit.

6. "Waltz of the Flowers" from The Nutcracker. Greet everyone on your blog with the classical Christmas tunes.

7. Christmas music: For all the traditional Christmas tunes. A Google gadget for your iGoogle homepage.

8. Menorah: For our Jewish WidgGeeks. A candle is added each day. (If anyone can find a dreidel widget, I'll be forever grateful...I can't find one anywhere)

9. Kinara: Kwanzaa widget, with a new candle everyday. From Springbox, the same developer as the menorah widget.

10. Dancing Santa: an embedded YouTube video (yep, they're widgets, too!). Too funny, too addicting.



Happy holidays!

Holiday Travel Helper

IT will cost me nearly $100 to visit my parents and sister over Thanksgiving.

Not that you can put a price on family, love, blah blah blah.

But, for those of us quite short on cash and high on miles to drive this holiday season, here's a handy (and well-done) gas pricer being promoted by Apple right now. You tell the widget your zip code, and the widget hooks up with Google Maps to find you the best prices on the way. Nothing is more frustrating than gassing up to the tune of $3.70 per gallon only to see a sign advertising $3.60 ten miles later. You can also choose to look only for a specific grade or all grades (in the picture, I was search for all grades...I'm just in a small town where most gas stations don't bother to offer more than regular.)

Though it seems to be a simple, low-importance widget, the way it pulls information and provides customized details from multiple, unrelated sites without forcing you to get online, find gas stations and then check their prices on each company's Web site makes it a strong widget.

Safe and happy travels!

Widgets and the Brand of You

FACEBOOK, MySpace, OpenSocial, Twitter, Jaiku, Xanga, Flickr, Friendster, LiveJournal ...Social networks have made our personalities, our private lives, a new brand. Updating your brand can rival a full-time job.

Widgets help manage your personal brand online. If you run a blog, you can put a blidget on each of your other sites, but that only links your social profiles to your blog, not instantly updates each individually.

Zude has acquired the reputation of being the Switzerland of the social networking sites by the blogosphere for its ability to compile, view and link all of your other profiles, blogs and personalities into your one Zude profile. But it's new widget reverses the process and allows you to update your status in ONE place, and instantly be updated everywhere, from Facebook to Flickr.

Whether being able to constantly update the entire world (or at least your gigantic network of e-"friends") of your constant location changes and mood swings is a good thing we'll leave to debate somewhere else. For better or worse, widgets are letting us broadcast ourselves in cyberspace in a more instantaneous way than ever before.

This widget is unusual because it's function reverse of what other brilliant, useful widgets are. Most widgets pull information from various sources, repackage it and pile it into one widgety-delicious package. The Zude widget takes one source and distributes it to multiple sites.

If a widget can do all that for measely you and I, imagine what it could do for corporations with a lot more time and money to devote (Zude offers options to create family, group and business profiles) With a new ease of updating, those who sell can increase their Web presence, personalize how they sell themselves to each site or market, all while keeping the ease-of-maintenance.

But until then, Zude must be satisfied with selling you to the masses.

Not-for-work Widget of the Day

Light Bulb Jokes

With over 1,000 light bulb jokes, you can offend every gender, sexuality, race and creed in your office! (see below...)

Far and away, funny4myspace has consistently had the most shocking/useless/borderline offensive widgets out there. I would have expected more out of the accessories for the social network that gave us Tila Tequila. Way to go.

You're a Consumer Whore...and How!

JUST in time for the holiday season, here's WidgetWatch's list of widgets that save you a few bucks--and time clipping.

1. salestastic.com coupon widget: New widget that allows you to choose from a list of national chains to find out what their sales are. Works well across different browsers. Annoyingly, however, you can't copy the code OR download the widget to your dashboard, only check it online (and it's one of the ugliest widget's I've seen. Ever.)

2. Couponcabin.com: The original multi-store coupon widget. Customizable and printable, with over 900 stores.

3. MamaGets: This Yahoo! Widgets lets you type in what you're in search of, and this widget gives you a couple comparisons.

I had some trouble with the embedding code for MamaGets and Couponcabin, so use the links to download 'em to your dashboard.

Rock the Vote

IT may have taken a little voter fraud, but I finally have the NBA All Star voting widget.

Apparently, you have to vote to get the code for the widget. I know absolutely nothing about pro basketball (I go to Syracuse, it's all about NCAA!), so ten lucky players just got my vote because their names all started with my favorite letter.

Voting for the NBA All-star team began last Thursday at NBA.com, stadiums, via good ol' snail mail, and, for the first time, via widgets available at NBA.com.

The number of votes cast for the teams increased to over 69 million votes last year, a 17% increase. The 2004 Presidential election saw a 16% increase from 2004 (though the number of votes was nearly double the number of NBA All-star ballots), according to numbers from the FEC.

Come January, it will interesting to see if the widget makes a difference in voting numbers, and even more interesting if the NBA can offer a break-down of the demographics. Perhaps the widget is the new voting booth--perhaps it takes this ultimate convenience (laziness) to get the youth vote out.

Widget as enabler...it's an interesting proposition. Would more people vote for political elections, from president to your town's zoning board, if they could do it through their neighbor's MySpace instead of schlupping over to the polling station?

Even if the numbers went up though, I'd worry they'd be random votes--votes that came in simply because it was easy to vote, without any research or care. But in a one-click world, maybe we just need the simplicity.

WidgeQuickies

JARED Novack's post brought up some great points about news widgets. While I agree that there is definitely still a void that needs to be filled, I'd also like to give ya'll some widgets that are already doing this.

Novack mentioned slate.com's Election Scorecard, which definitely is one of the best election widgets out there. Other notables include:

1. The Washington Post's Election Collection, which allows users to choose one candidate and follows their travels and money-making. It still has the links to the traditional narrative stories, but piles all the info in one place.




2. Fundraising tracker, from non-partisan maplight.org. Choose which candidates you want to track.



3. Polling Report: Aggregate of all the recent polls on politics, from which candidate is ahead to Pres. Bush's approval rating.

Storytelling the Widget Way

THIS post comes from guest blogger Jared Novack, graphics developer for chron.com and endofprint.com mastermind.

"If you search through Google or Apple's widget library you'll find plenty of widgets from news organizations. But like much from established news organizations on the web, the product doesn't quite match with user's needs.

Let's take the RSS widget that lots of news orgs put out. What's the reason to use RSS in the first place? Aggregation. On my Google Reader I can pull in 100 different feeds. Sort them to make sense, and have all the news I'm interested in one place. An RSS widget basically just resegregates content into little (glossy) blocks.

My theory is that for a news org, these widgets are designed as a marketing tool. Sure, I can visit the Today show's web site for the latest cooking tips. But why miss the chance to stare at Matt Lauer on my Yahoo! Widget bar all day?

So what's the point of informational widgets? While the standard web site allows you to read information, the key to widgets is they allow you to monitor information.

My two favorite widgets are package tracking and flight times. A year ago if I wanted to track my Amazon shipment, I would go to my email, find the tracking number, go over to FedEx, find the US package tracking tool, paste the number... Now the widget automatically updates that information for me, and all it takes is a glance at my Dashboard to see when my DVDs are arriving.

So what news can you monitor as oppose to read? Stocks and weather are obvious areas already well tapped. But as the 2008 elections ramp up, poll data and results stream in from the primary states. Slate has a cool little feature called Election Scorecard on their site which is begging to be made into widgets. During the '04 elections electoral-vote.com became a sensation in the blogosphere for its aggregation of state poll data to predict the winner of the electoral college (as opposed to the Gallup and Zogby polls pushed in the MSM that focused on national totals).

The widgetizing of news speaks to the central problem of most news websites today. We still tend to think of news as a 600-word block of text instead of unfiltered information.

What's the best way to tell the story of the Iraq War's cost? An 800-word piece about the latest appropriation? Or a widget calculator estimating the total cost?

Much like blogs, the point of a widget isn't to have a widget, the point is it's another story form on the web. And for now, mostly untapped."

Not-for-work Widget of the Day

The Stupid Test 2

You will fail. Your boss will see. Everyone in the office will think you're even more stupid than they already do (because you already have way too many of those widget-gamey things on your computer).

(If you think you can pass, or just have to find out, please, try it here on this blog rather than downloading it).

Meebo Me, Baby

I KNOW ya'll get oh-so fired up over widgets. So fired up that maybe commenting on posts just isn't satisfying or instantaneous enough.

Meebo Me.

Meebo, the Web site that brought together five different instant messengers and enabled us to chat away from anywhere without downloads (unlike other IM combos like Adium), has been expanding it's family to include Meebo accounts, widgets and, starting today, games where users can chat as they play (more on those later). It's become an international hit--just check out the Meebo Map to see where Meebophiles are sending IMs.

The Meebo widget--mine's over to the left on the bottom--allows visitors to chat to a site operator directly from the page. If you type something into the Meebo, I'll get your message on my account instantly.

So if you've got a bone to pick, hit me up, we'll Meebo it out.

Widgety Goodness Conference

YOU know you've hit the bigtime when you have a conference.

The first ever widget conference will be held December 6 in Brighton, England (about an hour by car from Central London and one of the hippest seaside towns in England).

I see a very WidgGeek vacation...

The Widgety Goodness conference is hosted by original WidgGeek Ivan Pope, who is about as controversial a figure as there can be in the world of widgets (his most recent pronouncement: the widget is the harbinger of the death of the domain name and the standard internet model as we know it).

Topics will include everything from development platforms for those that design their own to the marketing and financial future of widgets (in a keynote by Colm O'Connor of Joost).

The speakers' list goes to show that widgets are becoming a serious business and industry--these folks aren't just a bunch of programming geeks and bloggers.

In a true new media move, there will be no press passes released, only blog passes. Feel free to hit up pay pal and sponsor your favorite widgetblogger to go...

No word yet on whether American companies and developers plan to catch up with a conference of their own...thoroughly not surprising.

Personal addiction

I CAN'T live without the qube.

I've been purposefully trying to avoid just giving shout-outs to whatever widgets I'm grooving on, but I can be silent no longer.

You need this widget.

This is a widget for the ADD generation, the generation of on-the-go, all the time. You can get an overview of everything you need to know to get through the day, and if you happen to have an extra 45 seconds, the qube links you to the provider site.

It's a terrific business proposition, too. Widgetqube makes money of advertisements placed (sort of) innocuously, and the provider sites make money (eventually) because the qube drives their page views.

The presets for news outlets on the qube are pretty solid--you get a good variety of traditional and non-traditional media. But you can add your favorite news outlets, and check them all at once (I have the BBC, the Washington Post, and the Huffington Post on my general news tab). I'm also a fan of the different tabs--health, technology, politics, and the likes. Too often, RSS widgets limit themselves to just the top headlines, or just hard news. While widgets thrive on specificity, there is something to be said of having such a huge variety of topics there. Presumably, the widget serves those just needing a thorough but quick survey of what's going on in the world. Having a variety of topics naturally extends from this idea; these folks need a wide-range update. It's something that broadcast, paper and even news online cannot provide.

This is what a news-based, RSS widget should be. I know there are tons of RSS feed widgets out there, some from a third party, some that feed just from one news provider's Web site. Personally, I prefer mixed feeds in general because you get a diversity of voices. But it is the options, the customization, and the variety of the qube that makes it stand out.

A widget that works

THERE'S more to widgets than harvesting headlines and playing games.

Today, White Fence, an the largest online comparison marketplace for home needs like electricity, gas and other utilities and services, today released it's widget (see the bottom of this page). The purpose is to allow realtor's to add value to their Web sites by being able to quickly answer potential buyers' questions about the cost of living in the area.

That's a pretty hefty task for a technology that evolved primarily to enable people to waste time at work.

The White Fence widget stands as an example of where widgets are going in the future: mega-utilitarian, mega-time saving, mega-functional. They will expand our ability to offer related products to what we're selling. White Fence widget enables realtors to help their customers beyond their personal abilities. In the future, maybe there will be widgets to add that connect to banks home loan information. Colleges could have similar loan widgets. A jeweler could have a widget for restaurants on it's engagement ring page.

The Internet has made our world smaller, expanded the global village, yadda yadda. But it's widgets that are bringing it closer and closer.

Not-for-work Widget of the Day

Lava Lamp
AFTER searching for, downloading and trying more widgets in the last week than ever before, it has become incredibly apparent that some developers like to make their products when they are completely baked.

Lava Lamp has to be such a product, since lava lamps can only possibly be amusing with the help of THC in real life; it can only require additional substance abuse to make them amusing on a computer screen.

Lava Lamp has 27,589 to date. REALLY?!

Save this one for the home computer unless you want your boss to suspect your stoner habits, past or present.

Make Your Own Widget

So you want to make your very own widget, but the idea of learning hard coding makes you nauseous and you think cascading style sheets belong on fancy hotel beds.

It's OK. You can still make a widget of your very own.

While you probably won't be able to generate a masterpiece of widgetry, if you're looking to create a personalized countdown, news feed, photo slideshow or other simple addition on your friends' and families' blogs and desktops, you'll be just fine.

Here are a few freeware programs and Web sites I've found that walk you through the process:

1. Widgetize, on Opera: Has a few templates for RSS and photo slide show widgets that you can make for your blog or personal Web site or ones that pull from the Web sites you visit. Downside is if you want to do the photo slide show, you have to have posted your pictures on an Opera-hosted site, or on Flickr.

2. Widgetbox. I can't support this site enough. They'll walk you through making a blidget (widget that compliments your blog) or MixIt (iTunes playlist widget), and once you've made your widget here or elsewhere, they'll help turn it into a Facebook application. I used Widgetbox to make the WidgetWatch blidget.

3. Dashcode Developer Beta Alas, this one is just for MacGeeks who have already updated to Leopard (though the widgets you make will work in Tiger, too). No coding neccessary, as it comes with a variety of templates to choose from and adjust. Download Squad offers a great tutorial for using Dashcode to make an personal RSS feed.

4. iGoogle Gadgets: Biggest selection of basic templates, from slide shows to countdowns to a 'free form' option that pretty much does anything, BUT, because Google is selfish, you can only use your gadgets on your iGoogle homepage. iGoogle also has a developer platform and some pretty good tutorials if you want to start learning to code and make your own widget from scratch.

What are you into?

THE widgetization of the Web/world is an entirely user-driving process.

So, as a widget consumer, what are you into?

Widgipedia and widgets.opera.com both have areas where users voice their wildest widget fantasies...and the fantasies come true. Just browse either gallery and see how many developers mention their products came as a result of a request in the forums (the Lava Lamp, today's Not-for-Work widget, was created this way).

Current hot topics on Widgipedia include text-message widgets that would send free messages to your friends' phones from your computer or site (though I'm sure Verizon or AT&T will pirate the widgets and make the messages cost money...) and widgets that will run on Vista and compete with Mac OS's long lead on the little guys.

Opera's blog has requests for widgets that backs up important files necessary for the Opera browser and ones that work in multiple languages.

Telling, isn't it, that these requests aren't for lava lamps, puzzle games or RSS feeds, but for very practical purposes. These requests are changing the direction the widgetized Web is going. It's up to us, not AOL or Time-Warner or other big providers.

So what's your wildest widget fantasy? Just say the word in the right blog, and maybe it will come true.

Now if only someone could develop a fantasy-granter widget...

The Dangers of Widget Use

MY dashboard has become a widget orgy. Everywhere you look, there's widgets on top of widgets. Speech bubbles cover up the silly Virtual Pet I downloaded only to make fun of in a previous post, but now find myself addicted to. When Yahoo! Widgets is up, it's even worse.

I might have too many widgets. A few weeks ago, I would have told you that such a thing is impossible, but now I've come to think it is. There's so much clutter, I can't actually use the widgets. The BBC tracker is essentially useless: by the time I find it and start reading, on of the interactive ones beeps or pops up and needs attention, or I get distracted by the fish aquarium.

I'm going to have to start detoxing on the widgets. It's not going to be easy.

This Dashboard is a Facebook-Free Zone

IF spending hours a day on Facebook (or, simply, The Book as my friends have taken to calling it) doesn't fulfill your craving for constant information about your friends, download one of the many Facebook related widgets.

There are a variety out there, ranging from the simple desktop-based search widget (in case you're so focused on friending that hottie from the bar last night you can't take the time to open your browser and navigating to the page) to this one, which updates constantly, letting you know as soon as you have a new message, friend request, etc.

With the unending stream of emails from The Book, the notifications, the pokes and wall post warnings, it absolutely boggles my mind that anyone would possibly feel the need to put this widget in their dashboard.

The Facebook/widget combination moves us deeper and deeper into the era of obsession: we want our information and we want it now. And now. And again now. And probably again in 20 minutes (gotta bring the laptop to class...).

I have to wonder which came first: the obsession and ADD, or the widgets and Web sites that enable us to exercise our inner stalker/procrastinator. I love that widgets can compartmentalize the information we want, pull it from a million sources and reduce it to the nuggets we need to get through the day, but I hate the compulsion they seem to drive. I know if I downloaded this widget, I would never accomplish anything. Ever.

That being said, I think the widgets for Facebook are yet another brilliant development move by Zuckerberg and the developers who use the platform. He's built a business on the fact that college students love to gossip, monitor each others' whereabouts and immortalize our drinking adventures. The widgets are just another part of selling obsession, and the perfect method to do it.

Not-for-work Widget of the Day

Piano

Fun for home, but you will drive your coworkers postal if you dare play it in the office. Enables you create an annoying little ditty that will get stuck in every one's heads for days and destroy productivity.

With only eight notes, you'd think it would get boring after awhile, but somehow you feel like a miniMozart. Try it at the bottom of this page.

Get WidgetWatch's Blidget

BLIDGET: A widget that links to a blog.

WidgetWatch very happily announces the addition of a blidget to the family. Now you can easily access WidgetWatch from your dashboard. It just makes sense. You can download it here.

Add a blidget to your brand, no hard coding necessary. It couldn't be easier. Major props to Widgetbox for putting the technology in the hands of the everyman, where it belongs.