The blog widget — now officially called the FriendFeed Feed Widget — lets you dynamically display your feed on any site that accepts HTML embed code. It’s essentially the same option that had previously been available in beta but now with newly built-in options for customization — things that used to have to be done via CSS coding. Some of the advanced customization options still require CSS, but the new widget page features a handy guide to the parameters, which makes things far easier than the educated guessing game you had to play with the beta version. For some odd reason, the widget won’t display correctly here at the moment, but I’ve had success embedding it in other places.

The other offerings include the FriendFeed Badge, which displays your services and recent activity; the Share on FriendFeed link, which lets site visitors share your content on their feeds with a single mouse click; and the FriendFeed Chicklet, which creates a small, Digg-style image to link visitors to your FriendFeed:

All together, a good step forward for FriendFeed, no doubt.

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The Widget Channel will use Intel’s new Media Processor CE 3100 along with Yahoo’s Widget Engine to bring Web content to a television platform. The technology will essentially deliver a degree of Web 2.0-type service to the TV, letting you interact with content and share information with friends. It’ll also offer news headlines, photo access, and video-on-demand-style services.

Much of the content will be powered by established Internet services, including Flickr, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Finance, eBay, and Blockbuster. A slew of other companies is working on new widgets, too — everyone from CBS Interactive to Disney, MTV, Samsung, and even Twitter.

Here’s the other interesting part: The whole platform is designed on open standards, so smaller developers will be able to get in on the action as well. Javascript, XML, HTML, and Adobe Flash will all be supported. As of now, the SDK is still in its early stages and is only being released on a limited basis.

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Widget-maker Goowy will be used as part of AOL’s Platform-A as of this week. Clients will be able to use the already free service to build and distribute their own widget ads through all of AOL’s and Advertising.com’s sites and properties. The widgets will also be set up to be directly integrated into Bebo and Facebook application-based ads.

Goowy formed with a humble four employees back in 2004. Rumor had it the startup saw only a single round of funding that totaled less than $1 million. The San Diego business grew to a six-person team and was then bought by AOL this past February, when it was merged into the company’s People Networks division.

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