We hope you like the new reading experience!

This release improves the ability of a widget to “go viral”. In particular:

• Get It Now. When someone sees a widget out in the wild, like on a blog or MySpace, they can get it right there, without going back to Widgetbox. New and existing widgets get this automatically — be they Flash or HTML/Ajax — and it works on every site, including MySpace.
• New places to install widgets. Most notably, no-code installs to Google homepage, Netvibes, Pageflakes, and “email this widget to a friend”.

Here’s how Get It Now works.

Click a widget’s Get Widget button…	…to pop up a menu right there, over the blog page.

A few of the sub-screens:

In addition, there are hundreds of small features, usability improvements and perhaps an easter egg or two.

Enjoy!

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.

Here are the current five most popular widgets on Widgetbox:

• Baby Ticker – The Baby Countdown Pregnancy Ticker
Babystrology built this widget on January 31st and in about 5 weeks watched subscriptions grow to 1,800. And, it continues to add hundreds of subscriptions each day. Each week as your baby’s due date approaches, the widget baby grows and develops to match the real-life pregnancy. Proud parents-to-be can’t seem to get enough of this widget.

• AddThis Social Bookmarking Button
AddThis.com put their widget in our gallery when they launched in October. It’s a widget that promotes your website or blog and works with all popular bookmarking services. AddThis.com is using Widgetbox as a widget “Amazon” to distribute their widget well beyond their own site. This week they got the TechCrunch spotlight, too.

• YouTube Videos
Bastawhiz, a.k.a. Matt Basta, put this widget in the gallery and watched it gain 954 subscriptions. Just as you would expect, this widget uses the YouTube API to display all your YouTube videos on your site. This widget is among 15 of Matt’s widgets in our gallery – many of them with hundreds of subscriptions and most of which focus on social networks. I can’t help but point out that Matt is 17 years old – it will be amazing to see where he is in a few years!

• There are two widgets on the most popular list that we built here at Widgetbox. We sometimes widgetize interesting or important web assets that haven’t already been added to our system. In this case, who could resist the classic Pacman (1,224 subscriptions), or an XSPF Music Player (1,101 subscriptions). Anyone wanting more games or a different music player can browse or search our categories and tag clouds for others.

So what makes these widgets so popular? (Widget developers, take note!)

• They are social – they’re built around things you want to share with your friends and readers, like the news of a pending baby, favorite websites and blogs, as well as videos, music and games.

• They are personalized – it is your baby’s due date, your website or your blog, your videos, your playlist – subscribers are using our multiple configuration options and expressing themselves with these widgets. We have found that the more personal the widget, the more users love it! Web 2.0 is all about expression and connection on the web, and these widgets exemplify that.

• They are simple and catchy – how can you resist: a replica of your baby’s development that starts moving in the third trimester – all within a widget! Or, a tiny badge for easy bookmarking. Or, your favorite videos stacked in a tower ready to share. The content combined with the form factor of these widgets make it easy for people to consume and share them.

• They are promoted – subscribers are talking about them. After they embed the widget on their blogs and web pages, they tell their readers and friends about it. They blog about it and link back to it often so that their readers will take note. Lots of “hey, check it out…” happening with subscribers. We attribute this phenomenon to a combination of the first three things we outlined here. The more social, personalized, and simple a widget is to use, the happier your users will be with it, and the more viral it will become.

Our growth in subscriptions is happening across the entire Widgetbox gallery—this is not simply a handful of the most popular widgets experiencing rapid adoption. Recently, we’ve seen an increasing number of widgets with multiple hundreds of subscriptions. This growth in subscription is a strong sign of our viral growth. It’s a sign pointing to a viral marketplace and clear indication that the power of our Widgetbox Syndication Platform™ is working. Our users tell us again and again how much they appreciate how easy Widgetbox is to use–something we have worked extremely hard to achieve–which helps both them and us syndicate our widgets and our message. In addition, our developers are using our Widgetbox Syndication Metrics to track and follow their widgets, which pushes this viral spread even further. We love watching the growth and spread of the Widgetsphere!!

• No-paste installation into MySpace.com, a popular social networking site.
• You can adapt your widget so that it can link out of MySpace.

No-Paste Installation Into MySpace

Widgetbox lets users install Flash widgets to their MySpace profile without cutting and pasting. Our MySpace installation screen lets the user choose what part of MySpace to install the widget to:

This is for all Flash widgets, even ones that already exist in Widgetbox.

Linking out of MySpace

Adapting your widget to be able to link out of MySpace is a short and sweet process. A MySpace link-enabled widget is wrapped with two “softkey” buttons, similar to cell phones softkeys. Here’s what it looks like:

Normal Widget

With Softkeys

Link Selected

These softkeys only show up when the user installs on MySpace. Everywhere else, the widget appears normally.

You can learn more about this and the rest of Widgetbox’s flash support in our flash developer guide.

In last Friday’s release (Feb 23) we:

• Improved rendering times for blogs with very large RSS feeds.
• Added support for a few new variants of feeds.
• Improved our rendering when the HTML content of a feed is malformed.
• Added a cool new image option.

With the new image option you can display just the headline and first image in each post. It’s especially good for image feeds like Flickr and Revver. Examples:

Existing blidgets can take advantage of this option — just go to your My Widgets page and update it.

Enjoy!

The most notable new feature is tag-based browsing. When you click in a category, you see a tag cloud with the most popular terms within that category:

We added tagging because the catalog of widgets had grown to the point where simple categories no longer cut it. We knew we’d get to this point, and we did, and we’re happy with how it turned out!

Things to note:

• All our existing widgets have been retroactively tagged.
• When a new blidget is registered, we look at the blog site and extract tags from it.

When you create or edit a widget, we guide your tag selection in a couple of ways.

Way 1: we suggest tags from a tag cloud. Clicking on a tag in the cloud adds it to the widget.

Way 2: as you type, we auto-suggest tags:

Enjoy!

Sometimes I am asked, “Why do we need widget aggregators? What’s your role and value in the web ecosystem?”

I like to answer this using the analogy of books and Amazon. Amazon’s service provides amazing value in book recommendations, affiliate programs and marketing opportunities. For example, take finding a good book. You don’t need Amazon to find the Top 10 Bestsellers – you can find those at the supermarket. But, go down a level, and how do you find a book that matches your specific or general interest among the rows of bookshelves or online titles. On Amazon, you can browse by subject, look at bestsellers in categories, see new releases, look for bargains, etc. If you want a recommendation, you can read the reviews and ratings from Amazon’s editors and customers. Or, you can consider the intelligent cross-promotion such as “if you like this book, you might like this one too,” “customers who bought this items also bought”, and “customers viewing this page may be interested in this sponsored link.” You get it – you know Amazon creates immense value to their customers by leveraging their network of customers.

So what does this have to do with widgets?

Apply the question of “how do I find a book that matches my interest?” to “how do I find a widget on the wild plains of the web?” That’s where Widgetbox comes in. As the critical mass of widget builders and widget consumers accelerates, there is an increasing need for a widget “Amazon.”

We built the most powerful and easiest way to rate, recommend, find and browse web widgets. From day one, our widgets are presented by new releases, most popular, top rated, featured, and a myriad of categories for browsing. When someone selects a widget, we give them a list of similar widgets they might also be interested in.

And, like Amazon in the early days, our recommendation features will evolve and gain viability as the network evolves. You will see us continually tweak, reiterate and improve the Widgetbox navigation and recommendation functionality. You’ll also see us offer impressive affiliate programs and co-marketing opportunities. These improvements and advancements to our syndication network are made possible by our underlying platform, the Widgetbox Syndication Engine.

People are using features like these every day on Widgetbox to navigate through our thousands of widgets to find the one they are looking for – whether they are searching the specific or browsing the general. This is the value of a widget aggregator, or widget marketplace as we see ourselves. Our syndication network reaches well over 20,000 sites today and that number is growing quickly; all widget developers benefit from the distribution and business opportunities provided by this network.

Like Amazon and books, our job is to keep widget users happy and coming back for more. Part of that is providing them with relevant reviews and ratings from people with similar interests and needs so they can find the widget they are looking for.

Let me know what you think about this analogy and our plans to build the “Amazon” of web widgets.

• Reservations at a romantic restaurant.
• Box of candy / flowers / poetry / ring.
• A blog decorated with one of Widgetbox’s delicious Valentine widgets.

Get your blog ready with one of our Valentine’s Day widgets!

Feedster adds a lot of value to the blogosphere, and especially their excellent enterprise-level solutions for businesses. Check out their Feedster Feedpapers. It’s an effective way to sift through the staggering amounts of new information the web is generating every second. And, you can explore all this dynamic content through their Content Channels.

We’re hoping all of those bloggers on Feedster will build blidgets. Thanks Feedster!