http://www.insidetonic.com/2007/01/26/musestorm-talks-about-widgets/

lol

The guys At YourMinis are truly amazing. I met with their CEO a few weeks back and they are really onto something.

We are also building a new service and a very engaging part of the offering is the widgets that we will be making available at VidoSticky.com …as you can tell we are hard at work at 2:30 in the morning. ;)

Cheers, Rodney Rumford

My company, Lijit, creates a Personal Vertical Search widget that turns any blog into a vertical search centered on the blogger’s content (across delicious, digg, Flikr, linkedIn, etc..) and the blogger’s social network (and all their content).

http://www.lijit.com/

In all fairness, Widgetbox publicly launched it’s widget syndication platform in September of last year, and although a lot of attention has been focused on our successful widget marketplace, many widget developers are making use of our infrastructure services to syndicate web content and to track and analyze it’s usage.

Indeed, a widget storm is coming… We hope to not only be the FIRST widget syndications service, but to be the best.

The service was in closed beta for the last few months, SeekingAlpha being one of the best partners we worked with. As David pointed out, our AJAX-based widgets did now show correctly in some environments, mainly because of CSS collisions. Our new widgets are pure Flash, and render well anywhere.

I’ve been on a widget kick of late and it started with this blog that James links too, in fact I’ve done two widgets so far one is just something and the other is quite a bit more sophisticated.

The one, the white one in the screen shot is a count…

However, we’ve found that Musestorm widgets don’t seem to appear correctly on Blogger blogs.

We’ve noticed that our headlines are increasingly appearing via widgets from Feedsweep, which should have been in your list, Om. Look at the way Mad Money Options has fully customized Feedsweep widgets for his website, for example:

http://www.madmoneyoptions.com/

That being said, they are a good marketing tool.

I experimented with a widget on a site I ran a year ago that would allow the user who places the widget on their blog to embed their own adsense code into the widget. So, what they got was my widget marketing my content and something that disguises their ugly adsense. People seemed to like it.

However, companies that make and distribute widgets as their only service have no business raising millions upon millions of dollars. The VC’s that give away this money are doing a great disservice to their investors. What in the world is that money being spent on?

Thanks for the mention. Our vision for yourminis is as a platform of widgets that offers you a variety of usage options including as a personalized start page, as public pages you can share(see some of our published pages at http://dir.yourminis.com), as individual embedded widgets (we just released this functionality – you can go to yourminis select any widget, customize it and then get the embed code to add to your personal site, blog, etc.), as a browser plug in (travels with you anywhere you go on the internet and gives you added 1-click options for the content on the page you are currently viewing), as a desktop client in the near future, and on wireless flash lite enabled devices (coming soon).

2007 will be an interesting year for the widget space.

The most innovative thing that I’ve seen in terms of monetizing widgets has been the widget itself as an ad format (using Bitty Browser), as reported by Steve Rubel here:

http://www.micropersuasion.com/2006/12/informationweek.html