Snipperoo

Social Networking Awards - The Top Social Networks of 2006 - Mashable!

Just noticed Mashable's Social Networking Awards 2006 results are out. Here is the Widgets and Add-Ons category:

Our Choice: Slide.com

People’s Choice: Zwinky

Hot for 2007: RockYou, Stickam, Snocap, Zingfu, MyBlogLog

View Nominees

Slide.com and RockYou have been the most talked-about widgets this year, with Slide.com gaining a little more traction with the MySpace set. Both are impressive products which give users the freedom to express themselves. Even the launch of MySpace’s own service, MySpace slideshows, didn’t put a dent in the popularity of these two slideshow tools. Zingfu, another one of our favorites this year, has also achieved success by allowing users to create funny images of themselves and their friends. Meanwhile, we think Stickam’s live webcams are a killer idea, and the service will be a big success. We’re also hopeful that MyBlogLog, a service that helps communities to form around blogs, will successfully expand to the mainstream in 2007 - they added support for MySpace only a few weeks ago, and we think that could be crucial.

The popular vote, meanwhile, went to Zwinky. The avatar service has a huge, dedicated user base consisting largely of teens. In our original review, we said that Zwinky “will probably be a massive viral success despite a lack of interest from the geek elite”. We stand by that claim going into 2007.

Charity Badges

Richard at Read/Write covers the Yahoo Charity Badge - it's a widget:

Yahoo has come up with a way to mix social networking with charities and non-profits. Called Yahoo! For Good, it has partnered with 'charity aggregator' Network for Good and launched a personalized Charity Badge - for people to put on their websites, social networks or email. To promote the initiative, Yahoo! will match the amount raised by the user who generates the largest number of individual donations from their personal social network (up to $50,000).

The Charity Badge works by allowing website owners or social network users to create and publish a personalized badge (essentially a widget). You can even put it on your email signature. With the badge you can set up a link to your favorite charity, so that family, friends and others in your social network can donate as well. Or you can simply copy the code for an existing badge, that someone else set up for a charity.

Marketing with Widgets

Online Marketing blog does a good interview with Lawrence Coburn from the Sexy Widget blog. This does a good job of covering the background to web widgets.
Marketing with Widgets - Interview with Lawrence Coburn

Tech industry spews Web companies, doohickeys so fast we can't keep up

Kevin Maney from USA Today gets phased:
Tech industry spews doohickeys so fast we can't keep up

There is so much coming so fast from so many corners that nobody can possibly keep track, much less ever, ever try using it all.

Money is flying into ventures that most people east of Palo Alto, Calif., would find incomprehensible. Dash Navigation got $17 million from high-profile venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Dash bills itself as a "social network of traffic data" — allegedly getting cars to wirelessly talk to each other about where they are and reporting to the network if they're wheezing through bumper-to-bumper traffic.

Hard to say if it will work, but if you add "social network" to anything right now, you can get $17 million. Walk into a venture firm's office and say, "I've got a social network for hermits." Boom. Seventeen million dollars.

Which is crazy, because no one needs millions of dollars to build a consumer Web business anymore. In fact, that's why there are so many new sites. Creating a complex site is way easier and probably 10 or 15 times cheaper compared with six years ago, tech entrepreneurs say.

At the same time, ad dollars are rushing to the Web. David Court of consulting firm McKinsey says, "In the next 24 months, we will see demand for online advertising actually outstrip the supply." That's why we're getting so many consumer websites: They're easy to build and a booming market for ads.

Pretty soon, neighborhood kids will stop setting up lemonade stands and instead build Ajax-driven photo-tagging recommendation engines, or some other confluence of buzzwords.

You can tell that some insiders sense a bubble-ishness in the air.

Like, I met with Gordon Gould, a successful, surfer-dude serial entrepreneur who just launched ThisNext. It is social networking crossed with shopping — or, to use his freshly minted buzzword, "shopcasting."

Throughout his presentation, he kept tossing around one overheated catchphrase after another — the wisdom of crowds, the long tail, product discovery — and then, to his credit, apologizing for it. "We'll take ThisNext to the blogosphere — which is a terrible term," Gould said at one point, seemingly tired of his own industry's rhetoric.

Then I met with Tony Conrad, co-founder of the new blog search site Sphere. Bloggers that day were jabbering about a redesign of del.icio.us — a social networking tagging community something-or-other site. And we got talking about the gaggle of sites popping up and how a lot of them seem just too geeky for words.

In this spirited conversation, I made the admission: "And I still don't know what the hell del.icio.us is good for!" Expecting Tony to lecture me on the momentous development that is del.icio.us, he instead grinned, threw up his hand and high-fived me.

MySpace widget clampdown

Big widget action at MySpace. It seems that a bunch of malignant widgets got into the system and spread like wildfire. MySpace's response has been to change how Flash based widgets operate and try to force a general upgrade to the latest version of Flash. Techcrunch has the full story along with a lot of good commentary for full details:

MySpace users are now being encouraged to download a beta version of Flash 9 in order to view MySpace hosted video.

It's slightly confused and will no doubt hurt the MySpace widget industry that has suddenly sprung up. The Techcrunch item also correctly points out that MySpace, in common with a bunch of other sites such as eBay, doesn't allow Javascript widgets anyway, so no change on this front. We are believers in an Open Widgetsphere, which means no discrimination between widget types, javascript, flash, iframe, embeds, what have you, all are welcome at Snipperoo. My view is that in time sites will find it a competitive disadvantage to not offer access to the mass of javascript widgets and the situation will change. We believe we will help this happen by offering a secure widget platform - more on this in future postings.