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 [...]

When you promote your Google gadget, you may also be unintentionally promoting your competitors gadgets as well. Google wants to provide suggestions to their users of other gadgets they might enjoy. The problem this may cause for you is that those “other” gadgets may just well be your competitors. Here is a way to keep [...]

Hulu Has begun integrating show specific widgets into their navigation. The Hulu video widget is quite nice and well made, though there were a couple of hiccups when it first came out. Each show description page now has a Widget tab, as shown below on the Daily show Hulu page: Hulu is offering two types [...]

Widgetbox has an enormous gallery of user made widgets. There are around 150,000 different widgets and they are about to achieve a benchmark in their widget distribution: 10 billion widgets served over 3 and a half million different domains. Your widget will be removed from this gallery soon if it is not “ad compliant”. Part [...]

Here is a gadget that displays the latest videos from Matt Cutts and the Google Webmaster Help team. Whenever they put new videos up they will be displayed automatically in gadget. This pulls the latest videos from The Google webmaster help YouTube channel which can be found here. (if you can’t see gadget in feed [...]

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 [...]

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 was going to do a post about some basic widget strategies. I asked Brent Csutoras if he wouldn’t mind me using his site, Weird Asia News, as an example for widgets. He said no prob, I have yet to write the post yet, but since I do have a widget made, might as well [...]