How long is the long tail of the Widget-Web?

Pretty dang big it turns out. We passed a major milestone at Widgetbox this week. Since launching about a year ago, we've spread widgets to more than 130,000 domains Web-wide. Also, we've served 500 million widgetviews during that time, on a little more than 20,000 unique widgets. This is particularly cool since Widgetbox is a community-based, highly distributed platform.

When I was at eBay, I saw first-hand how breadth and diversity make for a healthy ecosystem. It's pretty fun to see another open and distributed marketplace take off, this time with widgets as the merchandise.

When I first heard about Widgetbox, I was pretty sure this was a good idea. After all, great web experiences are no longer tied to particular urls. It's fun to see evidence that millions of people are now consuming the Web in portable chunks well beyond the Facebook phenom.

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The Values of Widgetbox

Recently, the Widgetbox team went through a process that helped us define what we value and stand for as a company.  It was a pretty awesome experience - I highly recommend it!  Essentially, we all chose 5 or so people we would like to put on our personal "Values Board."  These people are the folks each of us turn to and are inspired by when we think about what we care about and how we want to conduct ourselves in the world.  Some of them are historical figures, some from our families, and some are business leaders, entertainers, authors and even fictional characters. 

I thought it would be fun to share our collective values board with all of you as well - check it out!  (You'll have to ask Grant about Mike Tyson though - he can explain that a whole lot better than I can, but I promise he isn't going to bite your ear off...). 

It's a pretty fiery ball of inspiration, if you ask me, and it's great to have as a reminder around the office for why we are all here.

After we created our company-wide values board, we took the combined values of what each of these people stand for in our minds, and distilled that down into what we care about as a company.  Those values became:

• Treat others as we want to be treated
• Open up new opportunities and frontiers
• Help outsiders and underdogs win
• Succeed when our community succeeds
• Enable fun through discovery

Not bad, eh?  These 5 things are the ethos that we at Widgetbox live and breathe every day, and the really fun part is that these values involve all of you!  We're super excited about all the cool stuff we are developing to bring these values to life in a widgetized world. 

On a side note, I also wanted to share a fun picture of the whole team (minus Grant, who's in Hong Kong, and Ike, who is holding down the Boston office) we took this morning.  As you can tell, we are perhaps a bit too excited about our new sign and coffee mugs...

Happy Friday from Widgetbox!

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Side-By-Side Widgets

Question: 
I want to put two widgets on my blog, but have them side by side rather than stacked on top of each other.  How do I do that?

Answer: 
Widgetbox has a feature called panels that's built just for this sort of thing.  It manages a bunch of widgets on your blog at once.  Here's what you do:

Login to Widgetbox and go to the My Panels page:

Click "Make a New Panel" on right side of screen.  You'll see the Panel Editor:

Chose the horizontal panel orientation:

Select some widget subscriptions from "Item Palette" and drag into the "Panel Layout".  In the screenshot above, I put two Baby widgets into the panel.

Click Preview if you want. 

Click Save. 

Click on 'Install panel now'.  On the resulting popup click 'Get Panel Code'.  Copy.

Finally, back in your blog remove the old code and paste in the new code for the panel.

This should be it.  From now on, you can modify the widgets and panel at Widgetbox and your blog is  instantly updated without re-installing. 

Tip:  you can also add a Text Block to add in any info you want.

Tip:  If you don't want the widgets to touch, add "padding-right: 5px;" under the "Style (CSS)" option.

A blog with the widgets side by side:

Hope this helps!

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Spotlight: Lonely Planet Widget

We've seen a lot of amazing widgets and Lonely Planet Widget ranks right up there near the top. 

This gorgeous geo-widget can be an awesome complement to a travel blog.  You set up the default location and let your users watch embedded videos, read travel reviews, book hotels and publish their trip reports.

Grab it below, or get it at http://www.widgetbox.com/widget/lpmaps.

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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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