We're a finalist - vote for Widgetbox!

You may have noticed - either on our front door, or here on our blog - that Widgetbox has been selected as a finalist in the Webware 100 awards!  We are a finalist in the "Publishing" category, and we are thrilled and humbled to be included in this awesome list of folks tirelessly working on bringing you the best of the web.

Voting closes on June 11 (yes, that is this coming Monday!!!).  Please take a second and either click through the widgets you'll find on our home page or blog to vote, or follow this link to the voting page.  Thanks so much for your support!

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Don't want to develop a Facebook App? Just register your widget with us!

Yesterday, our partners at Revver wrote a great blog post about getting their widgets into the new Facebook platform.  But, the great news (we think) is that Revver didn't have to do a thing.  Instead of going through the process of learning FBML and working with the Facebook Platform, Revver simply submitted their widget to Widgetbox, and now you can get a feed of your Revver videos on Facebook.

How did that happen?  Well, it wasn't exactly magic. Widgetbox had the great opportunity to participate in the f8 beta program as a developer partner (thanks, Dave!), and because of this we were able to launch our app on Facebook at their event last Thursday. For our app, as I've posted about previously, we created the Widgetbox Gallery for Facebook using our new Remote Gallery feature.   I won't go into too many details here - you can read all about both of these in the previous blog posts.

What I think is super cool about this is that it gives widget developers, from an individual to a company, the chance to gain access to one of the widest and fastest growing audiences around, and all they have to do is submit their widget to Widgetbox.  Like always, we're happy to handle all the widget management.  And of course, all widgets registered with us come with our free Widgetbox Syndication Metrics, so you can track how your widget is doing.  Pretty cool, eh?  So what are you waiting for? Register a widget today!

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Galleries are Growing – More Partners Opening Their Platforms

We’ve always thought of social networks and blogs as platforms. Last week, when we delivered our  Widgetbox Remote Gallery™ feature, it was intended to help these platforms bring down their walls and provide a new level of openness for their users. With this new feature, we enable our partners to give their users more freedom and more choices in a way that is both easy and expedient for everyone.

Last Thursday, I wrote about the Widgetbox Gallery for Facebook, our first Remote Gallery partner. Today, I want to tell you about our stellar line-up of additional beta partners using the Widgetbox Remote Gallery feature. All of these companies are opening their platforms to Widgetbox content, and we’re delighted to create remote galleries together:  Freewebs, imbee.com, Xanga, and Six Apart blogging properties TypePad, LiveJournal and Vox. Seeing these company names gives me visions of widgets popping all over profiles  and blogs – and ultimately a vision of happy users. We’re thrilled about this rapid adoption of our new Widgetbox Remote Gallery feature – and we applaud these partners for providing an open experience for their users.

As I spoke about in Thursday’s post, this feature gives our partners easy access to an ever-changing inventory of widgets. And, we’re extremely flexible about how we do this. It’s been great working with these partners and understanding their individual needs, especially as they are pioneers and leaders in the social web.  They are a phenomenal group to work with, and  have helped us tremendously to refine this feature throughout this beta program and make it the best it can be.

Marc Ginsburg, president at Xanga told us that they were looking for a way to “offer their users tons of fun stuff.” We agreed that giving their users access to 10,000 Widgetbox widgets would fit the bill. Shervin Pishevar, president at Freewebs wanted to give their users “incredible choice and freedom to easily customize and personalize their website.” So, now without ever leaving Freewebs, their users can easily embed our widgets. The folks at imbee.com are using the feature to ensure the widgets available on the popular Industrious Kid social network are parent approved and age appropriate. And, Michael Sippey at Six Apart wants to extend their own widget galleries with ours to give their bloggers more choices to personalize their creations.

With the announcement of these partners, we feel the tide is turning and the social web is now embracing a new level of openness. It’s a good sign of things to come.  Stay tuned for more from us!

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Our First Remote Gallery Application – Widgetbox Gallery for Facebook

We just launched our first Widgetbox Remote Gallery Application today. You probably saw the announcement about the new Facebook Platform, their development platform to integrate apps deeply into their website. We were really excited to be one of their launch applications because now the 24 million Facebook users have easy assess to 10,000 Widgetbox widgets. And, what really excites us about that is the freedom it gives people to customize their profile pages – 10,000 widgets can provide an abundance of self-expression. It’s great to see a social utility like Facebook open up and give their users this freedom.

We developed a custom Remote Gallery Application on the Facebook Platform to create Widgetbox Gallery for Facebook. In case you don’t have a Facebook account (although anyone can get one!), here’s what it looks like and how it works. Widgetbox is listed in the library of applications Facebook created for their users – all the apps were built with the Facebook Platform and are tightly integrated into the website making it a seamless experience for the user. In a click or two, you install the Widgetbox app and it appears in the sidebar of your Facebook profile page. From there, you’re presented with the Widgetbox Gallery for Facebook, and it looks like this:

Once you’ve installed the Widgetbox app, you can browse, choose, customize and embed any widget you want on your Facebook profile page. The 10,000 widgets are presented by featured and categories. Click on a widget, configure it to your liking and install with one click. After that you’ll find the widget in your posted items – ready to enjoy and share right from your profile page.

We appreciate the opportunity to be one of the first Facebook apps – our thanks to our friends there. And, our thanks to our friends at RockYou, another app in their platform launch. We cross link to one another in the Facebook library of apps.

I also want to tell you a little more about this new Widgetbox Remote Gallery Feature we’re developing, as we’ve extended it to more partners as well. It provides a customized selection of widgets from the main Widgetbox gallery, and is embedded directly on the partners’ site so that users can easily find and use widgets to customize their profiles, blogs and web pages.

We created this feature to give our partners easy access to an ever-changing inventory of widgets. And, we’re extremely flexible about how we do this. Partners can select from over 10,000 third-party widgets at Widgetbox to create their own custom remote gallery. They can fully brand and style their gallery as we did for Facebook, or chose for their gallery to maintain the look and feel of Widgetbox. They have complete control over the widget selection – making the gallery as large or as small as they want. Widgets can be easily rotated and changed, and as new widgets are added to our main gallery they are immediately available to our partners’ remote gallery. Partners can register any widget into their own gallery, even if it’s not one of ours. 

Widgetbox Remote Galleries are all about providing value to the partners’ users, or promoting the partners’ brand and products – so we built it to satisfy their needs.  And, since the galleries are powered by the Widgetbox Syndication Platform™ -- they come with same ease of use, tag-aware capabilities, and infrastructure that you’d expect from Widgetbox.

Interested in your own Remote Gallery? Give us a shout.

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New Features

Widgetbox recently released several new things:

• No-code installs to Facebook, Hi5, Freewebs, Piczo, and Blogger blog posts (we already did Blogger sidebar).
• Streamlined and simplified process for installing widgets.  The experience is very similar to the one we previously introduced for getting a widget in the wild, off the Widgetbox site.  No registration is required.
• Blidget improvements.  It handles more foreign languages, loads faster, has better-looking components, and is more robust when feeds go down.  Widgetbox proxies and caches the feeds, so even if the blog is down, the widget falls back to the cached version.

Enjoy!

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