Of course, you may just be starting out and wand to build the best widget ever. That’s a lofty goal, but you’re going to need some help. The latest App Clinic episode from Google’s Android Developers channel has the advice and tips you need to realize your dream of building the best home screen widget ever.

The gadget, which looks similar to Google Friend Connect, highlights your total Google+ audience. Of course, it also provides a follow button.

“As a result, you can grow your readership across the web, and reach them either in the Google+ stream, or through your blog,” Google says.

“Those of you with the Google Friend Connect followers gadget can keep using it, if you like,” the company adds. “We retired most of Friend Connect earlier this year, but we’ll keep it running on Blogger for the foreseeable future.”

You can learn more about connecting your Blogger blog to Google+ here. You can start by going to the “Layout” tab in the Blogger dashboard, and selecting “Add a Gadget”.

According to a report (via Technology Review) from the makers of browser plug-in, Ghostery, one of the main causes of website slowdown is, provided the hosting service is working as normal and there’s nothing interfering with Internet access, all of the widgets and embeds site owners include in their site’s backend.

In fact, if you’re going by the blog post’s text, many of the slow website loading issues can be pinned on analytics scripts and/or widgets. The post even features a graph showing the biggest offenders in relation to site slowdowns:

As you can see, one of the biggest offenders in relation to site lag is a service called Avalanchers, which appears to be blog network suggestion site, but, as Technology Review says, it also comes across as a spam-filled link-sharing network, which is just the kind of thing you want to avoid if you don’t want to get bit by Google’s Panda movement. Not only is associating your site with such networks haphazard, at least in relation to Google rankings, slow website load times are a great way to ensure visitors don’t return to your site.

Based on the GhostRank panel findings, here are some additional points of interest, based on their findings:

• Avalanchers’ load time exceeded its next closest competitor, AdFunky, by a whopping 1,300 milliseconds.
• If you were to load all of these elements on one page, in succession, they would add about 22 more seconds to the page’s load time. Think about that.
• From a transparency standpoint, most of these companies don’t disclose how long they retain the data they collect or who they share it with.

Simply put, if you are trying to produce a quality site that appeals to your visitors — remember, we are now firmly in the grip of the holiday shopping season — avoiding these products, especially if used in conjunction with others on the list, is something to avoid. If search engine rankings, especially Google, is something you cherish, you’ll avoid these services as well. Not only does Google frown upon link-sharing networks like Avalanchers, slow-loading sites are not embraced by Google, either.

Simply put, avoid services like these, especially if you are using a combination of them, if strong Google rankings are something you enjoy.

Yahoo says its TV Widgets are on 3.5 million TVs around the world, and that they have active users in 135 countries. Yahoo also says the widgets provide direct access to over 50,000 entertainment sources at the click of a button. 

"Some of the most popular brands, including Facebook, Twitter, Pandora, eBay, Amazon, Blockbuster, CBS, USA Today, Showtime, YouTube, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Weather and Yahoo! Finance, have all developed TV Widgets for Yahoo! Connected TV," the representative points out.

"Our publicly available Widget Development Kit (WDK) also enables anyone to create a TV widget and broadcast to millions of consumers around the world,’ she continues. "Yahoo!’s scale and exposure to new audiences ensure that content developers and publishers have a vast opportunity with Yahoo! TV Widgets."

"In the future," Yahoo says, "you will be able to find Yahoo! Connected TV on new CE devices including set top boxes, media players, Blu-Ray players, DVDs, DVRs and other devices. This is because of Yahoo!’s partnerships with global silicon and integration partners which ensure that our platform works on all major consumer electronic device chip architectures worldwide."

Yahoo has displayed a great deal of confidence in its Connected TV strategy, and the company is going to need it, because competition is about to get tougher than ever. Google and Apple both plan on getting their versions of what connected television should be in as many homes as possible this fall. Not to mention other competitors like Boxee. However, Yahoo is clearly up to the challenge.

The widgets are designed to give users immediate access to their Google Voice inbox and settings from the home screen. 

"The Google Voice Inbox widget brings your most recent voicemails and text messages to your home screen," explains product manager Marcus Foster. "You can now quickly flip though messages in your Inbox with the widget, and selecting any message preview will open it in the Google Voice app."
 

The widget will also display the user’s credit balance. 

"Widgets are the next step in our goal of making Wolfram Alpha ubiquitous–available to everyone, everywhere," said Barak Berkowitz, Managing Director, Wolfram Alpha.

"With widgets you get a brand new way to experience the power of Wolfram Alpha and share it with your readers and friends. By putting the massive data repository and computational capability of Wolfram Alpha in everyone’s hands, we fully expect to be surprised and impressed by the innovative ways people put this power to use in their areas of interest and expertise."

Wolfram Alpha widget can be built in a few steps using the drag-and-drop Widget Builder.  Widgets can also be personalized, allowing users to customize the look and feel of the widget as well as the display of the results. Widgets can be created from any Wolfram Alpha query.
 

"Over the years, we worked closely together on a variety of projects, including the launch of a number of global OpenSocial based gadgets. Recently, we decided that we could do more if we were part of the same team…" says Don Loeb of Google’s iGoogle team.

"We are looking forward to working with Labpixies to develop great web apps and leverage their knowledge and expertise to help developers and improve the ecosystem overall," he adds.

"We both felt the time was right to come together," says Labpixies in its announcement. "We started LabPixies to create a truly personalized online experience and develop fun widgets that people find useful every day. Working at Google will help us scale to more users as well as giving our team greater opportunities. Google and LabPixies teams have worked on many projects together including the launch of global OpenSocial based gadgets. The acquisition is an opportunity to learn from each other to bring more apps to users, help developers and improve the overall developer ecosystem."

The Labpixies team will be based out of Google’s Tel Aviv office, and will anchor the company’s iGoogle efforts across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

This is only the latest in a string of acquisitions from Google. Other recent acquisitions include Agnilux, Plink, Aardvark, and Episodic.

The Google Buzz widget allows users to post text and photos with a single tap, directly from the Android home screen.

The Google Mobile Blog provides more details. "Like other mobile access points for Google Buzz, the widget lets you choose to tag your post with the location or place from which it was posted."

"You can post buzz about a great meal you had and share photos of the new restaurant. To save time, your posts will upload in the background, letting you get back to your scrumptious dessert without a wait."

The widget is currently available in English for Android phones running 1.6 and later. Google says it plans to add support for other languages soon.

Search for Google Buzz in the Android Market to download the widget. Once installed, you can add it to your home screen: tap "Menu" while on the home screen and select "Add > Widgets > Google Buzz".
 

The Lists Widget is fully customizable. You start off by selecting the username of the account you want to pull lists from, then choose the list name, title it, and give it a caption.

Then you can set your preferences for things like polling for new results, including a scrollbar, if you want it to run on a timed interval or load all tweets, how many tweets you want it to show, and whether or not you want it to show avatars, timestamps, and hashtags.

Then you can customize the colors of the shell background, the shell text, the tweet background, the tweet text, and the links. You can also adjust the dimensions of the widget or simply set it to auto width.

Once you are done personalizing the widget, you just grab the code and stick it on your site or blog. Now you’re sharing the lists you think are great with the rest of the world.

The Lists feature in general has been popular among Twitter users. It brings a sense of organization to the service that was simply lacking in the past. You can pretty much set up your Twitter feed as you would an RSS feed reader. It also works as a great discovery tool. You can look at the lists that have been created by people you arleady follow and find other great people to follow (if the lists are public).

The lists feature should be taken as a reason to post quality tweets. The better your tweets, the more likely you are to gain more followers. Now these followers can add you to lists and increase your follower count even more. If you appear on these lists and bloggers and other site owners post those lists via the widget, you are potentially looking at a great deal of added exposure, and maybe even traffic.
 

Related Articles:

> Twitter Expands the "Lists" Feature

> How Does Bing Rank Tweets?

> Driving Traffic with Twitter

The widget allows users to display layoff announcements in real time on their blog or Web site. Layoff Tracker displays the company name, date of announcement, and the number of jobs affected.

Users can also visit Telonu’s Layoff Talk Microsite where they can receive more details about a specific layoff, find out what others have posted and write an anonymous review to tell their story about a specific company.

Layoff Talk offers users an insight into what insiders are saying about a company including reviews to the latest layoff rumors and real stories from people who have been laid off.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, since the start of 2007, the total number of unemployment claims has risen to 2,394,434. January of 2009 saw more than 75,000  jobs shed at Caterpillar, Pfizer, Sprint Nextel, Home Depot, and more than seven other companies.