Ed just wrote about our five most popular widgets, and now I would like to introduce you to three of the developers behind them. I think it is interesting to consider what motivates developers to build widgets. It tends to be three main forces: to generate traffic, acquire users, and drive transactions. Of course, there is also the human interest angle. Two of these developers had a personal need for the widget they created – one to track their pending baby’s arrival, and the other to play YouTube videos—and the third was seeking a way to add widget functionality to his company. So meet Vincent, Dom, and Matt…
Baby Ticker:
Vincent McCurley is the developer behind Baby Ticker, our widget with the most subscriptions—2,200 right now and growing rapidly! Not long ago, his company shut down his division and Vincent found himself out of a job. A few days after that, he found out he and his wife were expecting their first child. Resume writing is never fun, and Vincent found a good diversion was spending time online reading everything he could find about expecting a baby. This led him to create Babystrology, a place for parents to chat, play games, and share pregnancy and parenting knowledge.
The initial inspiration for Baby Ticker was a quest to quickly calculate an answer to the frequent question: “How many weeks pregnant are you?” Originally, Vincent created a giant baby calendar poster with images of the baby at different stages in development, but the poster ended up so big he found it impractical. It was then he decided to create his first widget, Baby Ticker, using the same poster baby graphics.
Thinking other parents might find the Baby Ticker useful, he posted it on his Babystrology website. A few weeks later, someone asked him for a copy of it for their own blog. Looking for a way to do this, Vincent discovered Widgetbox. He discovered that our platform is a robust and easy way to syndicate widgets. He tells us that despite how easy it was, he had no idea it would become so popular and widely syndicated.
On the suggestion of a Baby Ticker widget subscriber, Vincent opened up a small online pregnancy gift store. Vincent is very pleased to see that Baby Ticker on Widgetbox is bringing increased traffic to the store. He’s even more pleased that this increased traffic due to the widget is also increasing his earnings.
As for the secret to the success of Baby Ticker, Vincent tells us, “I don’t really know. I guess I had a ‘problem’ and created a fix for it. And, it just so happened that a lot of other people had the same ‘problem’ too. It probably doesn’t hurt that you don’t need to be a geek to make babies either ;)”
We think we know why it’s a success. Vincent’s widget knocks all four of the elements Ed described in his previous post out of the ballpark. Talk about social, personalized, simple and catchy, and promoted. Couples awaiting their bundle of joy are grabbing this widget and sharing it like rabbits…
AddThis:
We first met up with AddThis and Dom Vonarburg at the DEMOFall conference last September, where both Widgetbox and AddThis were chosen to present. Boy, that seems like such a long time ago now, and it is great to see how much both of our companies have grown since then!
As many of you know, the AddThis widget helps visitors bookmark and share web pages using any bookmarking service. Dom tells us that the vision of AddThis was to help web publishers make their content move beyond their website, into the social bookmarking services (social media optimization). This widget provides valuable stats to web publishers about what their visitors are bookmarking the most, and how often.
By putting this widget in Widgetbox, Dom now has this same kind of visibility by checking out his Widgetbox Syndication Metrics. As he tells us, “I love the stats you provide. It’s great to see the evolution over time.” As I’m sure most of the developers out there know, our metrics are extremely robust, and can be broken down into hourly, daily, weekly and monthly increments. Dom also tells us that just listing AddThis on Widgetbox has helped him continually receive a lot of visibility—Dom, we are so happy to have helped.
We think AddThis is an extraordinarily useful widget and it was the first widget we put on our own blog. We think every blogger should use this widget. Alex Iskold in Read/Write Web also agrees – it’s on his top five widgets every blogger must have. It was the first widget to pass the 1,000 subscription mark on Widgetbox – something Dom blogged about when it happened.
We are proud to have AddThis as one of our Certified Partners. Recently, Dom and I have been chatting about some new ways to team up. Dom has some awesome ideas—stay tuned!
YouTube Videos:
As Ed mentioned in his earlier post, Matt Basta built the YouTube Videos widget at the ripe age of 16, and is one of 15 widgets he has built in our system. He is also a winner of our Autumn widget contest and happy recipient of the Lego Mindstorms NXT kit prize. Before this widget, Matt had already built a Top Spy widget for Opera. When he discovered Widgetbox, he moved it over to our platform and network.
After he spent a bit of time on Widgetbox, he found himself aching for a YouTube widget. Why wait around for one, he thought, when he could build it himself? Matt wrote up a simple PHP script that lists the videos for a specific user and throws them up on the screen. After playing with it a little to make it really sing, the YouTube widget was born.
Matt describes the popularity of his YouTube widget as a race—he has been watching it gain popularity and move up the ranks of the Widgetbox platform, getting closer and closer to the #1 spot. He’s currently at #5 with 993 subscriptions. While he knows YouTube itself is popular, and is not surprised that people like his widget, it is the speed with which the subscriptions increased that surprised him.
Matt says, “That was a startling experience. To know that what you’ve written has been taken to with such enthusiasm – it’s just an awesome feeling. When I review my metrics, it’s amazing to see the widget sustain popularity. And, it’s incredible the number of hits that I am getting! This widget alone gets more hits per hour than I get on the rest of my site in a whole week! And, I love it when people ask me, ‘Wow, you can put your YouTube videos on your MySpace?’ ”
According to Matt, his YouTube widget is still a work in progress. Recently, he upgraded it to a quasi-beta version that has a much cleaner interface, is more standards-compliant, and is a lot faster to load. He’s working on letting the user actually play the video right in the widget, but he might wait a few months until more users have Vista with better hardware.
Matt is a forward thinking guy and tells us, “Widgetbox provides an excellent framework and syndication platform, allowing the widget to be in a ‘pristine’ setting, with no users poking the code. Widgetbox gives me the tools to distribute widgets on a large scale. Web widgets are the future of website design, and Widgetbox provides me the opportunity to bring my technology in and take part in this mass-movement.” Matt, you took the words right out of our mouth – nothing makes us happier than seeing our users appreciate all the reasons we have built Widgetbox the way we have! Thanks for the kind words.
We think all three of these folks did a great job of leveraging all the elements that create viral widgets. It makes perfect sense that their subscriptions are growing every day, and their user ratings are very high.
Vincent, Dom, and Matt, thanks for sharing your stories with us and thanks for developing and syndicating on Widgetbox.
