Note to Google:

Tool bar Google gadgets are not functioning in the newest beta release of Internet Explorer 8 (Beta 2).

This includes parts of the Google toolbar navigation that depend on gadget functionality. For example the “button gallery” button.

When using a button that calls a gadget it just displays “Loading”.

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

Webslices appears to be a great product but I am not able to give examples or explain it very well, mostly due to a surprisingly tight lipped Microsoft. I am not sure why they wouldn’t want to help developers understand their product more.

I requested an interview via a Microsoft contact, and even though I specifically sent the request to a Microsoft employee at a Microsoft email address, I received a response from Waggener Edstrom, who are apparently representing Microsoft (who is one of their larger clients) in this matter. They said “We aren’t able to provide an interview at this time“.

Weird. I would think they would want to promote their new products.

Gee, I wonder why Microsoft developers tools aren’t taking off like wildfire

In any case, Microsoft has some great products that have enormous potential. Popfly is great and WebSlices has the appearance of being a game changing product, I like it alot, and will try to give some examples of it’s potential soon.

The webslices product and the IE product are thus far causing many errors and doesn’t really appear to be ready for prime time. Even their examples are causing me and some of my product testers computer crashes, and errors.

I would love to speak to someone in Microsoft about this as it is honestly the most interesting and timely thing I have seen Microsoft release. It has a very real potential of competing with Google gadgets (if they actually talk to developers about it).

To learn more about developing Web Slices, go here and download the kit to get you started. I am as excited about Web Slices as I was about Google gadgets, but it is very disappointing to me that I can’t get some info from Microsoft, and I hope that changes.