We came across this post the other day, written by Rob Safuto on the Awakened Voice blog. Of course, we’re biased, but we just love reading happy reviews from our community of millions! It is really, really fun. We are always up for the not-so-happy stuff too, as we want to make Widgetbox fulfill all your wildest dreams, but it is pretty nice to come into work all bleary-eyed and find something like this even before the coffee kicks in.

One of the things I like best about this particular post is that Rob outlines what we believe are our sweet spots in the Widgetsphere. He talks about our gallery, which is unique in the wild world of web widgets. We believe our gallery is incredibly important as it offers unlimited choice to people looking for widgets that fit their unique needs. Seems like Rob agrees with us!

He goes on to talk about how easy it was to make widgets using Widgetbox. As he says, “Creating a customizable, embeddable widget from a blog is as simple as entering an RSS feed and filling out a few simple fields to indicate the title, description, sizing and colors.” He’s talking about the blidget builder, which is a feature our community loves. One of the things that we love doing is providing tools that help anyone make widgets really easily – no coding necessary. The kinds of tools we try to provide allow people to make widgets super fast. We think of them as the “10 seconds or less” widgets. But this doesn’t just apply to the blidget. As Rob notes:

With Widgetbox you can go beyond just adding a blog RSS feed. I host my own flash audio player for my Mets podcast and have wanted to make it available for embedding everywhere. Widgetbox lets you do that. You can pass their interface flash embed codes, html or javascript, a web page or iGoogle gadget urls to make them into widgets.

Rob is right, you can definitely go beyond RSS feeds using our tools. We also love companies like iWidgets or Sprout, who have more robust and technical widget building tools than we do. We’ve seen great success with folks who use their tools and then publish those widgets into our gallery for promotion and distribution throughout our massive network. If any of you attended the SF New Tech “Widgets up the Wazoo” meet-up last week, you saw this first hand when we did a joint demo with iWidgets where we went from building a widget on their platform, to publishing it in Widgetbox, to grabbing the widget from SynthaSite’s custom gallery. It was pretty awesome.

As Rob kindly says at the end of his post,

I’ve become a fast fan of this platform and am already plotting my next few widgets. You can go here to see the widgets I’ve created so far. I think the best way to get a feel for the system is to create an account and try making a few widgets yourself. It’s easy and it’s fun. If you try it out come on back and leave a comment about your thoughts on the Widgetbox platform.

Thanks, Rob! And of course, we’d love to know what the rest of you think as well.

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