The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘widgets’

Despite criticism, and an overall frustrating experience, Google is definitely not ready to give up on Buzz. The latest indication comes today by way of a new Android widget that makes it easier than ever to post updates to the service.

The new Google Buzz widget for Android allows you to post text or photos to the service without having to launch any app on the device. And, if you choose, you can easily tag your location to your buzz, as well as determine if it should be public or private. This widgets extends the already solid support the Android platform is offering the young service. For example, Buzz is built into Google Maps on Android, as well.

This new widget looks very slick — easily one of the best widgets for Android yet. And it furthers my opinion that Buzz should have been launched as a location-based service first. Of course, this simple functionality wouldn’t be possible on the iPhone, which doesn’t allow for widgets (and who knows if they’d even accept a Buzz native app at this point — or if Google would even create one for them).

Google talked about Buzz quite a bit this past week during a panel at SXSW. They apparently are thinking about letting users pre-test new features now.

This new widget works on Android 1.6 and later. To find it, search for “Google Buzz Widget” in the Android Market.

We recently reviewed Wasabi, Netvibes’ powerful new stream reader which consolidates news feeds, blogs, Twitter and Facebook streams, email, and more in an extremely manageable interface. The site entered private beta recently and we have 200 invites for TechCrunch readers. To get an invite, visit Wasabi and enter the code “WASABITC.”

As we wrote earlier, Netvibes CEO Freddy Mini demonstrated parts of Wasabi at our first Realtime CrunchUp in July. In addition to the traditional widget view, which breaks up your feeds and applications into a grid of boxes on your Netvibes homepage, Wasabi now also has a “smart reader” view. The smart reader borrows from traditional RSS readers in that all the feeds and widgets you subscribe to are presented together in one column, updated in reverse chronological order.

You can see just a list of headlines, or an expanded view with the full feed. It looks similar to Google Reader, except that Netvibes supports more than just RSS feeds. You can import your Twitter and Facebook streams (read-only right now), as well as Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Flickr photos, weather widgets, stock widgets, and more. Plus, Wasabi has also sped things up to make the stream as realtime as possible. It is caching content from the most popular feeds and pushing that down to users as soon as there are any updates, and it will also be supporting both the Pubsubhubbub (PuSH) and RSSCloud standards aimed at eliminating the lag time inherent in RSS and Atom feeds.

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Moments after Craigslist founder Craig Newmark joins the Wikimedia/Wikipedia advisory board things start to go crazy.

Way back in 2006 Jason Calacanis, then an executive at AOL, was trying to convince Wikipedia to puts ads on the site. It would generate $100 million a year in revenue, he said, which could fund the project and other charities:

I sat next to Jimbo at a Wikipedia dinner over the summer. I begged him to put a leaderboard on Wikipedia and told him I would get AOL to sell it and host Wikipedia–for free. He declined saying there will never be ads on Wikipedia. I then explained to him in detail how that one leaderboard could make over $100M per year. I told him that they should take the $100M and give it to charity. They could help fund MediaWiki, the EFF, Firefox, and dozens of other open source projects.

Agree with them or not, Wikipedia has held firm to their no-ads philosophy, struggling through with donations instead. But today Rex Hammock noticed something on Wikipedia – a banner ad.

These aren’t “real” ads promoting third party sites, products, etc. They’re just in house ads reiterating the policy that Wikipedia will never have ads. But they clearly are ads. As a commenter notes below, Adblocker even filters them out.

“Knowledge Forever, Ad-Free Forever, Wikipedia Forever,” say the ads. They link to this page asking for donations to the Wikimedia Foundation.

Update: Readers point out that this is an annual effort by Wikipedia.

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Since it was turned on for all users late last week, everyone is talking about Twitter’s new Lists feature. Most people seem to like it, but some have no idea what it’s good for. Perhaps those people will understand a bit more about Lists potential with a new widget that Twitter has launched today.

The List Widget is exactly what you’d expect: A widget that you can place on your blog that displays a list of your choosing. One nice thing is that this can be a list you made or one any user has made (that is public). If you simply type in a user’s name, it will show their lists in a drop down menu. You then give the list a title, a caption, customize its look and feel, and you’re good to go.

But here’s why this widget is pretty cool: It basically is a way for you to create your own curated Twitter stream anywhere on the web. Obviously, you won’t be able to do things like tweet from it (though there is a reply button that comes up when you hover over a tweet — this directs you back to Twitter), but people are already making some great Twitter lists (like us and Scoble) and this is a great way to put them to work without having to go to Twitter itself.

You can choose how many tweets to show, set the intervals, hide hashtags — there are a good number of options. Best of all, these widgets offer something that Twitter itself doesn’t: Realtime auto-updating. Basically, this widget is kind of like a better, more customizable version of Twitter.com.

The List widget joins Twitter other widgets for profiles, search, and favorites. Find them all here. I’ve embedded our TechCrunch team list below.

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With the new Yahoo homepage that was previewed last July and is now rolling out more broadly as part of Yahoo’s new “It’s Y!ou” branding exercise, the main Yahoo homepage is taking on more of the personalization features on MyYahoo. There are all sorts of handy widgets in the left-hand column ranging from Facebook status updates to Gmail to any news feed (just type in a URL like Techcrunch.com and it will add the feed). When you hover over any of the widgets, a box opens up covering most of the homepage with information from that widget.

Today, Yahoo is making it possible to add applications made on the Yahoo Application Platform (YAP) to that sidebar as well. One of the first apps it is launching with is from personal finance tracker Mint, with its Budget by Mint widget. Other YAP apps launching today on the homepage include A-Z Wine Pairings from MyRecipes & Snooth, Books weRead by WeRead, Brain Trainer by Lumosity, a social version of the Flood-it game by LabPixies, kaChing’s virtual stock portfolio app, Movies by Flixter, and WordPRess QuickPress. YAP is part of Yahoo’s Open Strategy that it kicked off last year.

The Budget by Mint widget and other YAP apps are already available on MyYahoo, but getting on the main Yahoo homepage potentially puts it on front of 118 million American users a month, versus 25 million for My Yahoo (comScore). The app ties into your Mint account, and shows pie charts and bar graphs of your budget, spending trends, and alerts. You can see the percentage of your budget that is going to taxes, shopping, dining, bills, and other expenses, and even share that with your friends if you are into that sort of personal financial transparency.

Mint launched two years ago at TechCrunch40, and was bought by Intuit for $170 million earlier this month.

Here is what the Budget by Mint widget looks like when it opens up in Yahoo:

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Jeremy “The Animal” Horowitz just posted a list of exciting new rumors about the iPad including the announce date - around January 19, just in time to relegate CES news to the dustbin of history - and that it will be available in May. The device is just awaiting Steve Jobs’ signature on the dotted line.

There will be two devices, a 3G and a non-3G version and the resolution will be 720p or so on 10.7-inch screen. It will also run iPhone OS and have dedicated media systems as well as an ebook reader built in.

As a parent I love a little one-on-one time with the son and daughter in front of a good book. What I don’t like are those crap-gasmic Disney books that float through every child’s book collection, titles like “The Jungle Book” that are basically advertisements for the movies. And what I really don’t like is this new initiative by Disney and their partner to suck the life out of even those abhorrent configurations of words.

That said, you can probably tell what I think of these online versions of over 500 Disney books available now at DisneyDigitalBooks. Kids can read over 500 Disney books, make their own books, and even “befriend Disney characters,” as creepy as that sounds.

The books appear on-screen on your laptop and you can click on words for pronunciation. That’s right. It’s a book on a laptop. It features Disney characters. But what, there’s more.

You can add up to three kids for $8.95 per month or $79 for the year. $8.95 so your kid can prop a laptop on your kids bed and let him or her read Toy Story while you fix yourself a Tom Collins. Seriously. Is this what Disney wants? We have enough trouble convincing the kids not to ask to play Mario Kart Wii all day let alone equate reading with dragging a pointer across a laptop screen.

Add in wonky stuff like this request for a D-Name and the fact that this automatically enrolls you into Disney.com, entitling you to free spam, is an extra bit of insult to injury.

Maybe I’m old fashioned but is my outrage justified here? I agree that I’m a bit hypocritical in my adoration of the Kindle but after a certain point reading becomes a solitary pleasure. However, during the short window between birth and the age of gaining the ability to amuse oneself, there is a period when human interaction in front of a dog-eared, garage sale copy of “The Poky Little Puppy” is a small, good thing.

Oh, ok, that makes sense. Thanks.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Bloggers love to have widgets and badges on their sites that communicate their personal brand in the form of interests, causes, and affiliations. Korean startup SealTale is tapping into the widget craze by making it easy for bloggers to create widgets that express their affinity to particular interest groups and products. The TechCrunch50 finalist lets bloggers pick “seals” which typically shows the logo of a particular product or band or movement. They can also create their own seals.

When a seal is clicked on, it flips around to show an RSS feed made up of posts from other blogs that have seals with the same tags. In this way, blogs can connect to each other and send each other traffic based on common interests. The tags can be edited to to customize the feed. The seals also work across social messaging sites such as Facebook and Tumblr.

On the back of each seal, along with the feeds there are targeted ads (also based on the tags). And the seals themselves act as advertisements for commercial brands. Companies can offer seals and program the feeds with news, events, and other information they think will strengthen their bonds with brand enthusiasts.

The seals could be particularly effective as marketing vehicles for bands, movies, and other content. They will support music and video, in addition to text feeds.

Expert Panel Q&A:

Conway: How big is the market size, is it available today?

Chae Myungjin: Our service applies to all the services like Myspace and Facebook. It is like Google AdSense.

Conway: How long has the product been available?

Myungjin : It’s been available for 6 months in Korea, we have 20K users, 200K people who have come in.

Don: What is the revenue model?

Myungjin : We earn money from advertisements. Two ways. One is brand seals and product seals. Another way, which is an advertisement through the seal book, in the info tab they can upload advertisements in the form of feeds.

Calacanis: They can claim the seal, correct. If somebody made a seal for an iPhone, the company Apple could then buy it and put the proper information in?

Myungjin: Yes.

Calacanis: Judges, would you invest?

Conway: We’d have to see how the product took off and acceptance in other countries

Vardi: What he means is if he knows it is a success, he will invest.

Hirshhorn: It is obviously great eye candy, a way to say these are the brands I am interested in. Other than the interface I don’t know how different the delivery stem is.

TC50: Sealtale offers a personalized way to declare brand loyalty Venture Beat.
SealTale – New Widgets For Your Blog (?) #tc50 techgeist.

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For a social site that is into sharing, it sure has taken Facebook a long enough time to embrace widgets. Sure, they launched a Fan Box widget back in July for companies and celebs with a Facebook Page, and a few other widgets before that. But how many peopel actually used them? Now, Facebook has a new widget center that brings them all together.

There are five widgets in all: a profile badge, a photo badge to share your Facebook photos elsewhere on the web, a Stream Box to share your stream, the aforementioned Fan Box, and a related Facebook Page badge. Like other widgets, you can embed these on your blog or elsewhere.

The live stream widget, of course, is my favorite. You can see what it looks like at right. There is an everyone tab and a Friends tab. The Friends tab is hwat I actually see in my stream when I log into Facebook. Now I can embed that stream anywhere and expose my view of my friends’ ramblings to a wider audience. In addition to reading the stream, you can comment and add likes to items from within the widget.

At least that is what it lets you do in the preview. I had trouble embedding the widgets in this post, which is why I resorted to screenshots except for the TechCrunch Page badge below (but that could just be an issue with the way we have WordPress set up on our site):

TechCrunch

Promote Your Page Too

And this is what the TechCrunch Fan Box looks like:

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The list of established players in the imaging field is a long one. Nikon, Canon, Panasonic, Leica, Olympus, Pentax, Kodak… it goes on. For decades they’ve been fine-tuning their devices, and they continue fight fiercely over every market and price point.

Certainly this has produced some excellent devices: DSLRs today offer an unprecedented value for the amateur (or pro) photographer, but I can’t shake the feeling that all the big guys are spinning their wheels. After all, there are precious few real innovations in cameras these days — Casio and Fujifilm spring to mind with their innovative use of the sensor, but by and large, even the top-tier devices don’t really do anything that different from the ancient one-megapixel point-and-shoots of the late 20th century.

Researchers at Stanford want to change that. Although they certainly don’t plan on toppling the powers that be (in fact, they’re funded by them), they’re tired of cameras falling under either the highly-specialized or highly-generalized categories. After all, it’s all just data, right? Why not make the camera a versatile platform with a real OS, an open hardware standard, and — hell, why not — an app store?