One common question among businesses considering Google gadgets or other widgets is basically this…

“Why should I encourage people to use the functionality of my web site without actually visiting my website?”

This question makes sense if someone for example is monetizing their site via adsense. If they display their content elsewhere like iGoogle or Facebook they “lose” the money making part of their website.

The real questions that people should probably be thinking is “Why isn’t my content working for me where ever it is displayed?”

If your goal is branding for example, you can immediately jump into the gadget world and achieve your goals. If your goal is helping your customers then you can jump immediately into gadgets.

To make something available via gadgets, you should ensure that your portable content is accomplishing your goals. If you are not receiving value from your content when it is portable, you may want to start designing content that will.

To illustrate this, let’s look at the Getlisted Google gadget…

This gadget uses the canvas view of iGoogle to display all the information availible about your business, as though you were at the website itself. The entire functionality is there, including the ability to sign in and use your own personal dashboard.

Since the entire functionality is availible via this gadget, there may seem to be no reason whatsoever for a user to ever even visit the GetListed.org web site.

I am okay with that.

GetListed was designed as an absolutely portable being. Wherever and however this content is displayed is fine with me. If a user is using it on Facebook, iGoogle or other widget platforms, it still does it’s job and still provides value to the users and also provides value to to me, it’s creator.

In fact, the way your content is displayed is becoming less up to you and more up to what users want.

The GetListed functionality can be placed on any website by just using an iframe for example.

Here is the same functionality on another website via an iframe at feedthebot.com…

Content portability is fast becoming a web reality.

Is your content ready?

Getlisted Google gadget code is here

Iframe example on Feedthebot is here

Related post to portability is here

If you read this blog and you are a developer, you probably should let me know I often have work on neat projects.

I have project work for…

Open Social developers (javascript)

Search Monkey (php / xslt)

Facebook (php)

Be part of some of the most popular and innovative applications on the web.

I should also note that We Build Pages is currently seeking a full time, inhouse Perl developer for Troy, NY.

To find out more leave a comment or email me at gadgets [at] gadzi.com

Facebook has announced it’s new funding arm of fbFund.

Through this fund Facebook will distribute 10 million dollars to developers of useful apps. There are a couple different ways these funds will go out but I will describe the 2 Million they are giving out in a competition.

A quick run down of how this will work is this:

Nearly $2 million in non-recourse grants will be distributed between two rounds of the competition:

Facebook has opened up early registration for their developer event, f8.

The f8 ’08 sessions cover three different tracks with four sessions per track. These are actually pretty interesting sounding sessions. Early bird registration is only 150 dollars, to learn more about sessions and registration costs visit the f8 registration page.

This is a one day event so if you are planning on going to SMX Local / Mobile you can pull it off (f8 is the day before SMX). Look at the tracks below for f8, and notice the business and mobile tracks. hmmm.

Track 1: User Experience

Introducing the New Facebook Profile & More
Integrating Facebook Connect into your Website
Building Great Applications on Facebook
Design and User Experience at Facebook

Track 2: Technical

Advanced App Building
Feed and Social Distribution
Building to Facebook Scale
Made for Mobile

Track 3: Business

Building a Business on Facebook / Metrics & Analytics
Marketing your Application on Facebook
Entrepreneurship on Facebook Platform
fbFund: A Look Inside — Seeding Opportunity on Facebook Platform

During Widgetwebexpo, I noticed that there was alot of discussion about paid spread of widgets and almost none about organic spread of widgets. This caused me to change my presentation. There were companies represented there and widget teams that I felt could really benefit from some simple techniques of how to spread a gadget. So I made up a new presentation the night before.
The slides are just the main points of what I discussed, but you might want to check them out.

I would also like to highlight a great presentation about organic widget spread from Google I/O, I spoke of it earlier, but now the entire presentation is up. I recommend watching it.

And here is a great article about getting into widgets, and highlights Widgetbox, one of my favorite widget platforms.

WidgetWebExpo is coming up, but don’t just go there because you want to see me, there are other people too :) … 

Look for speakers from comScore and Forrester Research, as well as from Nokia, Motorola, Gigya, Clearspring, Sprout (my Hawaiian neighbors), MediaForge and more.

And let’s not forget widgets are like a start-up candyland, so naturally there are a few venture capitalists about like Fred Wilson from UnionSquareVentures, and great talents like Scott Rafer (former CEO of MyBlogLog), and Fleishman-Hillard to name some more.

Many CEOs are speaking at this event. WidgetWebExpo has a really good flavor of media savvy companies joining the the very real world of rich media marketing and advertising. Social

If you haven’t seen the latest speakers for the upcoming WidgetWebExpo, you might want to look again.

Google Apps Engine

Some quick answers to what Google Apps Engine offers, and why you might want to care about it.

A few months ago, Joyent (and Dell, and Facebook) announced free hosting (for a year) to budding application developers. These free servers were designed to scale and help developers who had applications which “took off” in other words, in the world of widgets and Facebooks apps, it is a real scenario to have 12 users one day and then tens or hundreds of thousands of users the next.

I took one of these servers and it performed quite well, but the endless changes of terms is about to make me drop it, as is the cost of continuing the service.

Enter Google App Engine

In essense the Google App Engine is a free way to host stuff. Ofcourse Google would slap me for explaining it that simply, but for a majority of users, that is exactly what it is is good for.

In the unlikely scenario that you get like 5 million monthly users or more you might have to pay like 20 or 30 bucks to continue using it, (see more pricing and App engine details here) I don’t think anyone with 5 million users will complain

I posed a couple of direct questions to some of the Google Apps representitives, and received itelligent, and blunt answers. Refreshing. Basically I noted that they were going up against a host of competitors who were often giving the same or more away.

Amazon has been wowing many developers with some great hosting options, and Joyent’s offer or a free year went over so well that they hardly could keep up with the demand.

They knew Joyent, Amazon and others were competitors, but felt (unsurprizingly) that their product was better.

I agree.

At Google I/O the announcement was made that Google App Engine was now accessible to everyone. To get yours, just go here.

Videos from Google about the App Engine have received a healthy viewership the video below has received around 150,000 views.

The amount of actual developers actually interacting with the Google products and APIs is very telling.

Google App Engine is something I personally like because it further takes away restrictions that people may have if they lack money or live in a country where there are no banks or credit cards.

Want to start a internet business? Cost: 0 dollars.

Good stuff Google.

By some miracle I was awake when this conference began at 8AM (ouch), and I was impressed by the keynote. I am happy I made it to see it, I was thinking of skipping it.

Keynote Speech

The keynote, as I said was pretty good. In it, Google products were highlighted, but the real crowd pleaser was when Android (Google’s mobile phone solution) was used to show Street View and the compass feature was shown. This feature allows the phone user to move the phone around and have Google streetview follow it’s direction. So if you are looking South, the view in Google streetview is looking south as well, and if you turn around and face north, then the view in streetview will look North as well, real time following of the users direction made us geeks break out into spontaneous applause.

Open Social was highlighted as well, and hightlighted well. Some useage numbers were given…

Total reach: 275 Million

Amount of developers: 20,000

App installs 50 million

Impressive numbers for something that hasn’t really even been fully implemented yet

AOL announced that they will have a gadget platform, and that it will be Open Social compatible. This wasn’t too surprising since AOL has been aquiring gadgget platforms for a few months now

Open Social Containers

Here are some items from Open Social containers…

iGoogle-

The new iGoogle is Open Social ready and Kevin Tom of Google put out some info…

-iGoogle usage:  50% USA / 50% out of USA

-Negative comments about gadgets will affect ranking in directory

-The Themes API will be updated shortly

- Canvas views for Open Social gadgets will be live this month

-Full open social compatibility… “this summer”

-There is an iGoogle developer blog

Imeem-

-3rd largest social media site

- Imeem media platform Open Social compatible

- Developers have access to media content (very interesting)

MySpace-

- remote container acces to MySpace data coming soon

- Full text search browser side is live on their site mail (via Google Gears)

Orkut-

- 60 million active users

- “millions” of app installs

- Rollout of Open Social to all users coming soon

AOL-

- My Aol will begin offering gadgets

- Adopting O-Auth

Linkedin-

- will offer home, profile, and canvas views for Open Social Apps

- Average user household income of 140,000 per year

- Will offer monetization to app developers

Netlog-

- Huge European social site

- 35 Million members

-4 billion pageviews a month

- will whitelist apps

- Offers help with localization/ language issues

- Monetization availible via charging “credits” and developer will recieve 65%

Ning-

- Adopting Shindig

- impressive numbers as far as users / social networks go

Google FriendConnect-

- Oauth and Open ID, and Open Social compatible

Yahoo -

-180 billion pageviews a month

- Social apps will be able to query yahoo social data

- Updates and presence data will be made availible (as in.. what a user is doing right now)

- will have canvas view

Here are the slides from the “Meet the containers” Open Social session…

| View | Upload your own

That’s it for now, I will put out more about other sessions soon…

Hi, this is just an open letter to Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask spam teams.

I will be speaking in depth about SEO and widgets at a couple of upcoming conferences and highlighting some of the more “dangerous” behaviors that can lead to spam trouble within widgets.

I have sent an email to Matt Cutts and I hope he sees it and responds. I also hope that anyone from any searchengine that has something they want put out to developers and marketers of widgets, please email me at guidelineguy@gmail.com

Thanks

The gadget/widget world is still young, and people are starting to “get it”, there is clearly a future. The core skill set of anyone wanting to be in gadgets is Javascript/Ajax, HTML, and PHP. In addition to those skills, micro design skills and designers able to minimize file sizes are useful as well, but what’s worth looking at beyond the core set of skills?

I see three areas where there seems to be great potential, but are not very widespread yet (even though some are ancient).

1) Canvas

Canvas is a HTML element. It is used most by Apple and the Safari browser of the iPhone. Canvas basically allows you to “script” images. If someone wants to be proficient in a skill that will have massive usefulness to gadgets in the future, I suggest this skill highly, and it is underrepresented, and the need for this skill can only grow. It isn’t rocket science, but it is becoming more important every day.

2) Feeds

Huh? Am I crazy? While “feeds” is a general term, and is supposedly well known, content distribution strategy is lacking experts. Virtually anyone who builds something with feeds (like a gadget) stays with whatever worked for them, and tend to not reach out to learn about other ways to implement and parse feeds. You would be surprised to know that there are not many people who have dedicated their time and effort into “feeds” and content distribution as a specialty, not just the technical ways of parsing, but rather current knowledge of interaction with emerging platforms and techniques.

Gadgets are content distribution.

Feeds are perhaps the most used feature of gadgets and is a skill that someone can realistically conquer. If you have a solid grasp of the technical know how of content distribution, you could become king of an emerging niche skill set. A dedicated person whose stays on top of the ways to spread content via feeds and who lives and breathes to stay current in this skill would be ridiculously useful, but are feed experts underrepresented? hmmm…

Can you name 30 ways to parse a feed? Are you current on ways to implement the Google AJAX Feeds API? Do you know the best way to distribute content with iUI? Can you confidently consult on a feed/gadget project that needs to use resources well because it has twenty thousand feeds and millions of views?

Probably not, but a feed expert would, but I just can’t find many. (btw… the AJAX feed API is about to become very important, I recommend at least a cursory look at it, oh, and the iUI developer Google group only has 29 members… hmmm)

3) Cross platform strategy

I fancy myself as someone who is into this, but there exists plenty of room for anyone who can effectively control the distribution of gadgets across all possible platforms. I think that any gadget that does well in one platform can cross over and do well in another. Have you noticed that each time a platform opens up it is always the same small group of gadgets that blazes the way? (Slide, ILike, etc.) guess what? those people get it. They are just itching to get their gadgets on every possible platform, but they are also something else… in-house. You are not going to find any of them explaining or consulting others on how to effectively go cross platform.

How many gadget strategy experts can you name? While there are a couple names like Niall Kennedy and Ivan Pope that stand out, but how many people actually name 10 or more companies that can handle the creation of enterprise level gadgets? How many know how incredibly simple it is to make your web property into a iPhone application? How many people can tell you how to spread your widget after it is created? How many people can tell you before you spend your budget on a widget it’s chance of success? I can, Niall and Ivan can too.

Can you?

Probably not. The people who dedicate their time to becoming familiar with not just which platforms can display your widgets, but also what methods of promotion work best within each platform, and how to attain large usage and retention via design and functionality are useful people.

I can’t name even 10 people who could be considered widget promotion experts who have a solid knowledge of more than one platform, and I am pretty familiar with the gadget world.