Outage

Widgetbox.com was intermittantly slow or down for periods of time yesterday (Friday Aug 24 2007), from 10am to 3pm PST.

We cannot apologize enough for the service disruption -- it is simply unacceptable.  We know that widgets are integral parts of your sites, a key part of the infrastructure your web presence relies on.

The Cause

The problem stemmed from our recent rapid growth in the number of people getting widgets.  This caused our nightly processing to take longer than previously, such that it overlapped with an unusually high morning spike in traffic.  We have a short term fix in place and will soon roll out a long term fix.  We actually identified the approaching problem an hour before it started affecting site performance, but coming up with a fix was challenging.

Thanks

Widgetbox has experienced amazing growth, and a mind-blowing community has grown up around us since we launched a year ago. You guys are the ones that keep us energized.  You have high standards. You demand reliability and transparency.  Thanks so much for choosing our service. Please let us know if you have any questions.

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FancyGens - A Rising Star

I wanted to shine a spotlight on one of the rising stars in the widget world - James at FancyGens.  We're highlighting this super hot developer on our front door right now, so go check out his cool widgets!  James has made nifty widgets that are perfect for a profile page, and they have become extremely popular on Piczo and other social networks.  James has truly captured the art of self expression, and these widgets do a great job of drawing in page/profile visitors who then want to make one for themselves.

I've really enjoyed playing with The Secret Message Scratch Card.  This widget brings me back to when I used to create secret messages with strategic crayoning (is that a verb?  I just decided it is).  Did anyone else do that?  Write a message and then cover it with black crayon??  This is much less labor intensive, and equally (if not more) fun!  I also have to admit, I'm a total sucker for the Love Card Countdown Clocks - awwwwww, so cute!

Seriously, though, James is doing great things in the widget space, and we are so thrilled to have him as a part of the Widgetbox community.  Keep 'em coming James!

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A Whole Lotta iTunes Going On

As you may have noticed by our very iTunes-y front door, Widgetbox has been working with the great folks over at iTunes, and we've got the new My iTunes widgets!  We've spent the last couple of months  getting these ready for your iTunes loving, widget building pleasure, and we couldn't be happier to announce the Widgetbox Showcase for iTunes - check it out, it's slick!

As you may have read about, iTunes just released these brand new My iTunes widgets, and once you are signed into iTunes you can very easily create web widgets and share top reviews, favorite artists, new music, movies, and TV shows from the iTunes Store.  Bring your code snippet back to Widgetbox, and you can configure and change the widgets to your heart's desire, add them with one click to your favorite sites, and change them whenever you want without having to copy and paste code all over again!  We think these web widgets are a great way to show the world the kinds of music you love.

While we were working with iTunes on these widgets, we also created a brand new widget tool - the MixIt.  With the MixIt maker, you can make a super sleek widget (Thanks George, Grant, and Omar!) out of any iMix.  For those of you who don't know what an iMix is, it is an iTunes playlist that you’ve chosen to publish and make available to anyone in the iTunes Store.  There are millions of iMixes over at iTunes, just waiting to be made into MixIts and shared all over the web.  Plus, you can make your own iMix at any time - just get started here!  We're pretty excited about the MixIt - enough that we created a whole category to house all the MixIts you guys build.

We hope you enjoy these new widgets - get some for yourself today!   

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Touching base

I wanted to stop by the Widgetbox blog to introduce myself, (Hi, I'm Michael Dearing) to tell you about some changes on the team, and to ask for your feedback.

Earlier this year I was lucky enough to learn about Widgetbox from several of my students at Stanford. (I teach at the Institute for Design in the School of Engineering, aka the d.school.) Around that same time, I was doubly lucky to meet the founders and exec team at the company. The Widgetbox values -- openness, giving the power of widgets to everyone, treating big and small folks the same, among others -- were very appealing. A short time later, I became an investor in the company and joined the Board along with our other investors, Sequoia Capital and Hummer Winblad Venture Partners (Jim Goetz and Mitchell Kertzman from Sequoia and Hummer Winblad respectively also are on the board). It's been great fun getting to know the team here and the extended community of developers, partners, and widget makers since then.

Recently, our co-founder Ed Anuff stepped down as CEO of Widgetbox. Ed's contributions have been outstanding as CEO and he'll continue on as a member of the Board of Directors. I've stepped into the CEO role temporarily while we conduct a search for a permanent leader for the company. Working closely with the Board and the rest of the team at Widgetbox is great fun and I look forward to this new, if interim, adventure. Also, we recently added Pam Webber to the team as VP Marketing. I had the great luck to work with Pam at eBay for many years and she's a terrific colleague and leader. We're all fired up to have her on the team.

I'd love to extend my Widgetbox colleague-base to include any and all members of the broader community. So if you have something on your mind about Widgetbox, the widget ecosystem, or life in general, I hope you will either post a comment here or email me at md@widgetbox.com. I'd love to hear your thoughts on what we can do better, what you really like, or anything else that's on your mind.

In the meantime, thanks for supporting Widgetbox. Whether you've made a widget, subscribed to a widget, or grabbed a widget on someone else's site using our platform, we're glad you are part of the community. If you haven't done any of these things yet -- what the heck are you waiting for? :)

MD

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Watch videos inline with new Funny or Die widgets

I am quite happy to announce that we've partnered up with the awesome folks over at Funny or Die to bring you some super cool (and 100% hysterical) widgets.  You can check them all out in their showcase on Widgetbox. 

I swear, I can't stop laughing at these videos.  If you haven't seen The Landlord yet, definitely watch it in the "Chosen Ones" widget.  It is truly laugh-out-loud-knee-slapping good.  I have to say, I might even like the Landlord out-takes even better - I can't believe what they went through to get Pearl to work her magic!!  Too funny.

Plus, how cool is it that we've created a video playing widget where you can watch the video right in the widget itself??  Thanks to Omar Megdadi, one of the fantastic Widgetbox engineers, you can now easily post and watch tons of Funny or Die videos, including Will Ferrell's faves, right on your profile, blog or other personal web page.  We're pretty fired up about this new bit of Widgetbox functionality, so you'll definitely be seeing lots more of it in the near future!

We're super excited to be partnering up with Funny or Die.  These guys are really reinventing what online video is all about - every one of the videos you'll find on their site was made expressly for the web.  That's right, no clips from TV shows, or pirated mobile videos - Funny or Die is all about true shorts created for pure, unadulterated online giggling.  Plus, if you submit a video to them, it might just get picked by one of the celebrities they work with.  Not bad!

Happy watching!!

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