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MySpace Creates Widget For Traditional TV Viewing

Bruce Houghton — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 15:27:45 +0000

MySpace has launched a widget designed on the new Widget Channel TV application framework being co-developed by Intel and Yahoo!. The MySpace Widget for TV allows users to interact with MySpace directly from their TV extending the MySpace experience beyond the browser and making the traditional TV experience more social.

Other social networks will certainly develop their own applications; and while adoption of compatible TV sets will take time, combining social networking with broadcast TV creates a myriad of possibilities for music marketers. Fans could interact with the artist and each other during a concert picking the next songs or inviting more friends to watch, for example.

More on the MySpace Widget for TV’s functionality:

The MySpace Dock

The Widget Channel offers a dock mode where users can quickly gain access to the MySpace Widget at the bottom of their TV screens. The MySpace dock is a place for users to keep updated on notifications, with links to “My Profile”, “Messages”, “Friend Requests” and “Status Updates.” Users can open the MySpace sidebar for more information when updates are received by clicking on an icon.

The MySpace Sidebar

Once a user clicks on an icon in the MySpace dock, the MySpace sidebar is opened on their TV screen. The MySpace sidebar is an expanded interface where users can interact with MySpace in a richer environment. The MySpace sidebar allows users to navigate all functionality of the widget and is organized in a familiar, friendly way to MySpace users. The Widget lets users update their status and mood, view friend requests, read and respond to messages, receive friend updates, and browse profiles and photos.

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Google Tests Displays in Sidebar

Andy Beal — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 19:06:16 +0000

It’s always fun whenever someone discovers one of Google’s many experiments with their search interface. 99% of the time, the discovered tests never materialize as a major rollout for Google, but it’s still worth noting.

Today, Valleywag has news that Google is testing the display of videos and products in the sidebar…

(image credit Valleywag.com)

Now, where have we seen this before, I wonder?

(via)

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Google Gets A GOP Griefer

WebProNews Staff — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 00:21:56 +0000

House Republican Joe Barton from Texas has a burr in his saddle about Google – 24 burrs, to be precise, some in multiple parts.

It is a testament to Google’s usefulness that despite the lengthy list of complaints he has sent to Eric Schmidt, Barton has a link to Google in the sidebar of his website.

Barton has a position on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, putting him in a place where he can make political hay of Internet causes. Declan McCullagh obtained Barton’s blistering little screed to Schmidt; for some reason the Congressman’s otherwise up to date website does not have it posted.

The letter requests a reply to its lengthy contents by December 18th. Barton wants the Committee to “better understand the privacy and consumer protection implications” of Google’s proposed acquisition of DoubleClick.

If such a response were to contain detailed answers to its questions, the reply would become the hottest read in the technology industry. Several questions deal with how Google delivers advertisements to users of its services, along with Barton’s questions on privacy and data retention.

We think Google would sooner switch its famed cafeterias to using school lunch menus before feeding this kind of information to Congress.

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My Facebook Vista Sidebar Gadget

Nathan Weinberg — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 21:27:06 +0000

With Microsoft buying a portion of Facebook, it’s only appropriate that tonight’s Windows Vista Sidebar Gadget is a Facebook one.

This Gadget, MyFacebook, shows you if you have new messages in your inbox, pokes, pending friend requests, lets you see your friends albums, friend lists and events in a popout, shows your status and a scrolling display of your friends’ statuses, and even lets you update your status right from the Gadget.

Getting it to work is tricky. After you’ve installed the Gadget, click the Facebook logo to login to your Facebook account. You’ll get a prompt to authenticate the Gadget, and entering your username and password should launch Internet Explorer. If it doesn’t work, you’ll need to open Internet Explorer (not your default browser, it has to be IE) and add https://login.facebook.com, http://login.facebook.com and https://facebook.com to your trusted sites list. To do so, click Tools>Internet Options, the Security tab, click Trusted Sites, then Sites, then add the sites. Start with the first site, then if it doesn’t work, add the next, and so on, until you can log in.

After you’ve logged in the Gadget, click its settings icon and add the feeds it requests. Do not select the option to show your friends’ albums, because it really does take forever to load. You can have multiple instances of this Gadget, so you can keep tabs on more than one Facebook account at the same time, as you can see in my screenshot.

There’s a lot going on in this Gadget, so take the time to figure it all out. It’s worth it. It may have some flaws, but this Gadget is already one of the best I’ve installed, and I’ve installed hundreds. Check out the Gadget page on Facebook to discuss with other users, and go to the Gadget author’s blog for more information and answers to your questions.

Gadget Spark – Great Marketing Idea

Brian Vuyk — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 01:14:02 +0000

Do you ever hear of a new marketing idea and think to yourself, ‘Man – wish I had thought of that!’?

William Cross, who many of you may know from SeoFox, sent me a press release concerning the launch of his new company, Gadget Spark. Gadget Spark is the first company out the door to market custom Gadgets for the Windows Vista Sidebar.

According to Microsoft,

Gadgets are mini applications with a variety of possible uses. They can connect to web services to deliver business data, weather information, news updates, traffic maps, Internet radio streams, and even slide shows of online photo albums. Gadgets can also integrate with other programs to provide streamlined interaction. For example, a gadget can give you an at-a-glance view of all your online instant messaging contacts, the day view from your calendar, or an easy way to control your media player. Gadgets can also have any number of dedicated purposes. They can be calculators, games, sticky notes, and more.

In the first year alone, Microsoft intends to sell 80-120 MILLION copies of Windows Vista, each with the Vista Sidebar enabled by default. With this sidebar being constantly on the desktop of every Vista user, it is quickly apparent that this will become hot property for marketers.

According to the press release, Gadget Spark envisions three main marketing utilizations of the Sidebar Gadgets (extracted directly from press release):

Blogging and social networks – People can add gadgets to their own space on a social network such as MySpace and FaceBook. It only requires one person to add it to their space for your personal space to become virally popular.

Branding – Companies can have their brand or logo displayed on literally millions of computer desktops over the next couple of few years. One click in their Windows Vista side bar takes them to your Websites products or services.

Affiliate Marketers – can create a mini-application such as a specialized clock, custom calculator, search tool, or anything else that has relevance to the sponsor the marketer is promoting. Gadget Spark can make a gadget that does it and at the same time use affiliate codes to make sure the marketer gets credit for any sales made from the gadget.

Gadget Spark is launching with 15 example gadgets available to the public free of charge, and will develop custom gadgets to fit your needs or marketing purposes for $599.

Care to Give an Example?

William gave a good example of the power of Gadget. Recently he created SEM Tutor, which gives daily marketing tips and tricks. Along with this site, he created a ‘Marketing Tutor‘ gadget which grabs the RSS feed from SEM Tutor, and displays the latest item, in effect presenting a new marketing tip every day via the gadget bar.

Despite having done no promotion of the site so far, William has managed to acquire 500 RSS feed subscribers as reported by Feedburner through the release of the Marketing Tutor gadget. For marketers, this is like acquiring an instant 500 person mailing list – one doesn’t have to think far to see the value in that.

What Makes the Idea So Good?

Now that you have a good idea of Gadget Spark’s business model, and have seen an example of a successful Gadet, I want to do some number crunching for a second to put the final touches on what I think may be the Best Marketing Idea of the Year:

Despite the fact that Vista is only relativly newly launched, by visiting the Microsoft Gadgets website and Windows Live Gallery, you can see that some of the top gadgets have already recieved over a quarter million downloads.

If we look at the numbers for the Gadgets already created by Gadget Spark and posted to the Live Gallery, we can see that even though most have only been online for 4-5 days, many have been downloaded and installed 1500-2000 times.

Assuming Microsoft only sells 80 million copies of Vista in the first year, that will still be many, many times the number of copies that are currently in circulation. If Gadgets maintain the popularity that they currently appear to have, they have the potential be downloaded by hundreds of millions of people. Due to Microsoft’s slow release cycle, any gadgets you create are likely to keep working for you for many years to come.

Roll this all together, and it is quickly apparent what a hot property Gadgets are. By being the first to offer development services in this niche, Gadget Spark should more or less be able to grab the lion’s share of the market. That’s why I think this is will be a strong contender for the Best Marketing Idea of the Year!

P.S. You can to read about the conception of Gadget Spark in William’s own words at SeoFox’s SEM News blog!

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Enterprise 2.0 in InformationWeek

Ross Mayfield — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 19:58:40 +0000

The InformationWeek cover story is Enterprise 2.0, based on a survey of engagement:

Despite the risks and problems, a solid minority of the 250 business technology pros surveyed by InformationWeek are behind this IT strategy push that has come to be known as Enterprise 2.0 (even if the overplayed 2.0 terminology makes some people wince). Nearly a third, 32%, describe their Web 2.0 strategies as fully engaged, our survey finds.

Reticent companies ignore the movement at the peril of their competitiveness. Within a few years, rich, collaborative software platforms that include a slate of technologies like wikis, blogs, integrated search, and unified communications will be the norm. Employees will expect to work that way, and it’ll be up to IT to solve the still significant problems and deliver.

I like the disclaiming sidebar with fair commentary about the category name:

The reason it gets used is there’s real meaning behind the tag [Enterprise 2.0] today, giving businesspeople a way to talk about the kind of collaboration and information sharing they must move toward. There will come a time when Enterprise 2.0 loses its meaning entirely, much as e-business did when Internet-based commerce became less of a novelty. When the kind of Web-based, highly interactive collaboration and information sharing that defines Enterprise 2.0 becomes commonplace, we’ll hang this one up, too.

InformationWeek suggests Nine Easy Web Collaboration tools, highlighting Socialtext. I need to clarify one mistake in the article, however, the following paragraph should refer to Socialtext Unplugged, the offline wiki, not Socialtext as a whole.

Socialtext offers wiki software with a twist — you can copy the wiki to your desktop, work with it disconnected from the Internet, and then merge it with the online version; Socialtext [Unplugged] is based on TiddlyWiki, a popular single-user Wiki that stores both data and JavaScript code in a single Web page that can be stored locally on the desktop or on a server.

In general the article is a fair survey of where adoption of Enterprise 2.0 is, just beginning to mainstream and a trend embraced by incumbent vendors. And it also highlights the varied experiences enterprises have had. Some overspent on security, some failed to gain adoption, some have a wonderful mess of experimentation they need to clean up. The article failed to mention SuiteTwo as a solution that encompasses wikis, blogs and RSS, but all in good time.

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Take Advantage Of Vistas Powerful Search

Nathan Weinberg — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 14:41:08 +0000

The Windows Sidebar team blog has a tip for getting the Vista Sidebar Slideshow Gadget to use images based on a search, rather than all the images in a specified location. The trick is to take advantage of Vista’s powerful search functionality (which regrettably, is hidden and handicapped in the Vista Explorer UI) to get the Gadget to use a virtual folder (known as a saved search) as its picture source.

All you have to do is run the search. Do whatever it takes, use all the search operators you need, and get the search exactly the way you want. Then, save the search as the only file in a folder. Point the Gadget at the folder, specify “Include subfolders” and, voila! The Gadget gets its pictures from the folder, which contains a search, thus having the functionality of finding images, wherever they are, that meet a certain criteria, and only showing those. You can even include multiple searches in the same folder to expand your results.

I’d imagine there are a lot of legacy programs that could be fooled into doing this. Rather than keeping all your music in a single folder, you could point your jukebox software at a virtual folder, and let Windows Vista find your music for you. Advanced search operators mean that you could include all music, except stuff that is too short, too long, too country, or includes the word “diddy”. Not that every program could use this, but its worth checking out, as a solution to a lot of otherwise hard work.

Vista contains a massive search backbone, one the operating system doesn’t use to its full potential. The reason: Older users got too confused. Just because it doesn’t do everything by default, doesn’t mean you can’t make it do what you need. Take advantage of the options available, and you’ll fall in love with it.

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Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.

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New Vista Sidebar Gadgets

Nathan Weinberg — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 19:37:38 +0000

I’m always on the lookout for Windows Vista Sidebar Gadgets (since the number is low, and the Gadgets hard to find), so here are a few more from Tom at Cener:

Wifi status Gadget:

Windows Live Messenger Gadget (could not get this one to run):

Battery status Gadget

The battery Gadget in the first screenshot is a different one. It is starting to really piss me off that there isn’t a Quick Launch Gadget.
(via Steve Clayton)

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Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.

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Web Developer Tools Rock Firefox

WebProNews Staff — Fri, 05 May 2006 19:43:13 +0000

An assortment of extensions for Mozilla’s Firefox web browser make it even more useful for developers who prefer using it for their work.

Before you even begin playing with developer extensions for Firefox, there are two extensions you should have already: Session Saver and Restart Firefox. We’ll wait while you grab those. Better safe than sorry.

Ok. Firefox can make one’s web development life easier with the right addons. Probably the most popular one available has been IE Tab.

It offers a very simple feature that allows the developer to view how a page will look in Internet Explorer without having to sully their monitors by launching the IE application.

Chris Pederick has created a few extensions, and the Web Developer extension this clever programmer created adds a toolbar to Firefox with an assortment of useful options.

Depending on which choice is selected, Web Developer provides a deeper look into images, forms, CSS, or other elements used to construct a web page.

After stacking several options into Firefox, there may be a need for utilizing the available screen space better.

The All-In-One Sidebar helps organize all of the nifty extensions one has into a panel on the side of the browser window.

The design draws from Opera’s panel, and places common links in the easily accessible panel. Selecting a link opens a larger side panel where the user can access all the options that link offers.

After creating a page, the developer can use FireFTP to move that page to a remote server. That extension provides an easy way to put or get a file on another system, right from the browser.

Firefox Extensions have drawn a number of developers into contributing to them. The page dedicated to them is always worth a look.

On any given day, someone may make an extension available that solves a problem you have, or didn’t know you had.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Make XP Media Center Look Like Vista

Nathan Weinberg — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 15:49:04 +0000

Green Button community member CM_MC has created a theme for Windows XP’s Media Center that gives it some of Windows Vista Media Center’s stylings.

From the screenshot, it appears the most significant change is that the mini controls in the corner are now transparent and much better looking. Also, the background is now the much darker blue of Vista MCE (not necessarily the most popular change).

The one issue: This is all possible because of a program called MyThemes, and the commenters at the Green Button don’t seem to trust it. Since I trust the Green Button and its knowledgable members, I’m going to hold off on installing it until I get the word that it’s safe.

This is via Chris Lanier’s blog, where Mike Garcen has the comment of the day:

Just wait til Vista comes out, and then someone makes a theme to make it look like 2005 : )

Absolutely! Microsoft has made some questionable decisions on Vista MCE (not bad, just questionable) and if people don’t like it, they will fix it themselves. MCE fanatics are just like that.

For further fun, here’s a skinning program for Windows Vista’s Sidebar, so you can change the stylings of the feature. It even works on the patched Sidebar that runs in XP.

Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.

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