Measuring the Widget Economy

You might have noticed that the front door of www.widgetbox.com now shows several key statistics that every blogger and widget developer will want to keep their eyes on. The number of widgets served up to blogs since Widgetbox began operations. The month-on-month increase of the size of the widget economy, as measured by growth in subscriptions (i.e., the number of widgets put onto blogs).

This is the one to watch. It's how happy and productive the good folks at Widgetbox are. You may not be familiar with the unit gHu. It stands for George Happiness Units, and is correlated to the amount of caffe latte in the bloodstream of our designer extraordinare, George.

This is Widgetbox's first foray into providing key measures of the widget economy as a public service. We'll be tinkering with more metrics as time goes on.

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Widgetbox v1.2 Released

Widgetbox released version 1.2 tonight. This release focuses on giving developers the tools they need to understand how their widget is being used out there on the wild wooly internet. We call this Widget Syndication Metrics. It takes the form of a powerful, easy to use analytics dashboard for widget developers that is free and comes with every widget on Widgetbox. Here's the documentation. One cool thing about it is that it's been in the works since before the very first beta version of Widgetbox was released, which means your widget's statistics go back to the beginning of time (i.e., August). The new metrics platform we put into place underneath allowed us to build one heck of a system monitoring and management console too -- not that you'll see it. If a fly lands on a widget in Khartoum, we'll know about it! We'll be blogging more about the metrics in a bit. As always, there's a bunch of little things here and there -- a usability tweak here, and easter egg there. As you use the site and the developer dashboard I'm sure you'll notice a few. Enjoy!

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Color Picker Can Now Leave Off The #

Widget developers, your wildest fantasies have been realized! When building your widget's config screen, the color picker data type now has an option to return the value without the #. For example, if the user chooses white it can return as "#FFFFFF" or "FFFFFF". This was requested for cases where you're passing the color as part of a URL. Most of those URL-based APIs don't accept # signs.

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Widgetbox v1.1 Released

Widgetbox released version 1.1 tonight. This release focuses on the usability of the catalog (browsing and trying out widgets) and is more friendly to people who want to link into Widgetbox. The following features are new:

• New UI for browsing and trying out widgets. Browsing for widgets should be a more fun and faster experience. Bloggers now see a single page that shows them all information about a widget, lets them try it out, and shows them other widgets they might be interested in. The UI geek term for the philosophy behind the UI is "ambient findability": we try to guess what information the user is likely to be interested in and pre-fetch it onto the page instead of making them click for it.
• Configure a widget from an external website. Many developers have a configuration form for their widget on their own website. Developers can now let bloggers configure the widget on their site and pass the configured widget to Widgetbox. More info.
• "Get This Widget" chiclets. Each widget now has a "Get This Widget" chiclet underneath it. This can be turned off on the widget's panel's editor.
• Chiclets for bloggers. The widget's gallery page has a simple UI for a blogger to get a link or chiclet to the widget.
• IE7 support. A lot of work to make sure the site and widgets look and work well under Internet Explorer 7.0.
• The rating star formula has changed. We use a five-star rating system that displays in half-star increments. It used to be that a 4.9999 average rating was displayed as 4.5 stars. In practice that meant almost nobody ever got 5 stars. We now use math rounding, meaning that anything 4.75 and above displays as 5 stars.
• Many small things. Many small usability and performance tweaks, as well as preparing the database for our next release. (Stay tuned for more details.)

Enjoy!

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V1.1 Feature - Linking To Widgets

Sometime in the next two weeks we will be releasing version 1.1. It will add several ways to link to widgets from outside of Widgetbox.

• Links for bloggers. A simple UI for a blogger to get a link or chiclet to the widget. This is done from the widget's gallery page.
• Preconfiguring a widget via its permalink. A widget's permalink will accept configuration information. For example:
  http://www.widgetbox.com/widget/my-widget?color=red
  This URL will take a user to the widget's homepage on Widgetbox, where they can either install the widget or do further configuration. This is useful, for example, if the developer has a configuration screen for their widget on their own site, that configuration screen can have a 'Install Via Widgetbox' link or chiclet.

Here's our documentation on permalinks. Here's a preliminary screenshot of how the blogger generates links. The final UI may be different. Here's a preliminary screenshot of the preconfiguring link generator. The final UI may be different. As always, feedback is much appreciated.

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