I was recently contacted by a fellow Google gadget developer and he mentioned his new venture called Snapabug.com and asked me to take a look. I did, and I am pretty impressed. It is a widget solution that streamlines a website/company support process. Imagine someone is having a problem with your website and contacts your [...]

Have you ever seen a grouping of Google gadgets available as tabs? It looks like the image to the right (click image to see what I am talking about). This is the way iGoogle tabs are distributed. A page like this is shown to the user who can then decide which of the gadgets will [...]

This post will describe the best practices of how to promote a Google gadget, but most of the things I mention are equally useful for any kind of widget promotion. Google Gadget Promotion 101 Let’s get right to a couple of obvious things first so that we don’t waste any time… Usefulness: If your Google [...]

1.) Widgetbox Widgetbox has offered for over a year something called “blidgets”. These are widgets that take a feed and, well, turn them into a widget. It takes only a couple of minutes to do it. In fact, you don’t even need to tell it your feed address, just your blog address. You just go [...]

One underutilized method of gadget spread is Internationalization. Google gadgets that are only listed in the English language are missing tens of millions of potential users. The Google gadget directory, when seen in Italy, prefers to show Italian language descriptions and titles. They are more useful to Italian users. Also consider that when an Italian [...]

I will be speaking at PubCon about widgets on the Wonderful World Of Widgets session. This will be my first officially “We Build Pages” speaking gig! For those of you who remember my adventures of last years PubCon you probably know that I do not like to be awake during the day, so if I [...]

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 [...]

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”.

Google was offering 100,000 and 275,000 dollars to the developers of applications for Android (Googles mobile phone platform). The winners were announced today. I am a bit disappointed that there are no charities or non-profits represented, but there are some clever, functional, and useful apps. Functionality appears to be the biggest factor in who won. [...]

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 [...]