The Inquisitr » widgets

Facebook launches “Fan Box”

Kim LaCapria — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 22:38:37 +0000

In an effort to murder MySpace in cold blood create more of a rapport between Facebook Pages and third-party websites, Facebook has launched the “fan box.”

Aside from sounding vaguely obscene, the Fan Box is a widget for companies, bands and brands to embed on a site to promote Facebook Pages. Adding the function involves merely including a snippet of Javascript code on your site. Operating somewhat like that handy little “share” button, it lets site visitors fan your Facebook Page with one click. From Inside Facebook:

“Users can view the most recent posts from the Page, see a list of other fans (including their friends), and, most importantly, become a fan without leaving the site,” Facebook Product Manager Mark Kinsey says. “Additionally, if a user visits the site and isn’t logged in to Facebook, the user can log in and become a fan directly inline as well.”

In other words, users can authenticate themselves to the widget using Facebook Connect in order to become Facebook fans without leaving your page. Later, when logging into Facebook, fans will see your updates in their stream just as they would any other Page they had become a fan of inside Facebook.com.”

The new feature is doubtlessly of huge importance to musicians and companies who wish to leverage their social media following more effectively. But in the whole debate over whether Facebook has killed MySpace, the one redeeming value constantly cited to keep MySpace alive is “the music.” The last big story about MySpace was regarding massive layoffs. Will this function put the final nail in MySpace’s coffin?

CafePress Launches New Embeddable Store Widgets

JR — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 16:30:18 +0000

CafePress is teaming up with e-commerce company Sellit to launch a new line of embeddable store widgets. The widgets are designed for use in social networks, blogs, or regular Web sites.

Branded as ShopBOT, the widgets provide real-time inventory and product selection from any CafePress selling account. Users also have the option to have their ShopBOT widget placed on “premium Web properties” as an ad for prices starting at about $10 a month.

The ShopBOT program is currently in a “broad” beta test, though allegedly any CafePress seller should now have the built-in option to create one widget per account. CafePress and Sellit are planning to have the program fully launched sometime in the first quarter of this year.

More information in the ShopBOT FAQ here.

CafePress

Sadly, Sprout Builder Drops Free Service

Duncan Riley — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 02:24:01 +0000

Web widget creation service Sprout Builder has announced that as of March 1 it will be dropping its free service.

It’s sad news for fans; it’s long been my favorite widget building site, and we’ve covered building widgets with Sprout a couple of times in the past.

The following email went out to Sprout Builder members this morning. Mashable also has more here. As much as I love it, and our widgets are built on it, I won’t be paying for the upgrade given there’s still a number of free alternatives out there, even if they aren’t quite as nice and flexible to use. If you’re running or using an Inquisitr widget built on Sprout, stay tuned as we’ll be creating some new ones.

Dear Sprout Builder Users,

Over the last year Sprout has provided you with a free solution for creating interactive Flash content and widgets. Like many technology companies, we offered our service for free while we worked on our products, spoke with customers and developed our go-to-market strategy. Now that we have developed a solution worthy of creative professionals at the best agencies in the world, it is time for us to monetize. Starting in early February, we will begin charging for our service. We hope that you have found value from Sprout Builder and will continue to use our services.

Please see this chart for more information about our pricing tiers. To thank you, we would like to extend a special offer only to existing users. We will provide a one time 20% discount off either 1 month or 1 year of service for Individual or Professional accounts if you pay before March 1st, 2009. Or, if you reduce your projects to three or fewer, you can select Basic at $13.95 a month, or $139.50 a year. Note – You will NOT see the Basic level advertised on our public Web site because the offer is only for existing users.

Payment will be built into the Sprout Builder system in early February. We will notify you when the PayPal system is in place. In the meantime, if you have any questions or comments please review our FAQ or email: .

While this news may come as a disappointment for those that have enjoyed using Sprout Builder for free, all companies must make money to grow and we thank you for your support. We look forward to working with you in the new year.

Carnet Williams
CEO

Fat widgets: a lesson in not understanding the end user

Duncan Riley — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 05:02:05 +0000

We announced the new layout of The Inquisitr earlier today, and there’s one thing we didn’t mention in the mix: we’ve streamlined what’s on the site and excluded a range of widgets. We’ve not gotten rid of them completely, but where possible we’ve tweaked those that remain to maximize load time and to minimize harm caused by outages (and we’ve still got some work to do there).

It’s not that I hate widgets. Quite the opposite, I love them, and a range of widgets appeared on the site during the design phase. But there’s a serious problem with many widgets from many widget companies. They suck. Not in what they deliver, but in what they do to the site.

Widgets have an obesity problem

Many widgets offered to website owners and bloggers today share the same problem: they’re fat (as in code size). Really fat. Obese even. If you’re spending thousands on servers, and you site is lightnight quick you may not notice. Likewise, if the widget appears on MySpace or Blogger you probably won’t notice either. But if you’re hosting a site yourself, load times count, and a bloated widget slows those load times. Multiple bloated widgets slow down the site even more.

I was keen on having rich media on the front page as part of the new mix, and I tried a number of suppliers, including VodPod, Voxant and ClipSyndicate. Without fail, the bloat from each slowed down the front page. Sprout Builder, perhaps my favorite widget building service has the same problem…indeed, although I haven’t named every widget provider, and not every widget provider is as bad, it’s endemic in the business.

Delivery time fail

Fat widgets don’t help, but fat widgets from hit and miss delivery servers are worse again. If you absolutely must offer a fat widget, the least you can do is to make sure that those showing your widgets get them quickly. Time and time again in testing, widgets were either slow to load, or in some cases, just didn’t appear at all, causing large portions of the site to not load (yes, you can code around this, but most people don’t have those skills). I can cope with fat widgets to some degree, but I can’t cope with the site not loading due to problems with service delivery from widget providers, even if it’s only occasionally. Every time a page doesn’t load, this site misses out on hooking new regular readers, and from CPM advertising impressions. It costs us money.

A lesson in not understanding the end user

Maybe the focus of most widget creators is on MySpace and Facebook profiles, where bloat isn’t a major issue when pages are served from a massive server farm, and I accept that might be the case. But many of these services target bloggers, directly or indirectly, and they have some responsibility in delivering a service that works quickly and reliably. That they continue to offer bloated widgets and poor load times would seem to demonstrate them not remotely understanding the end user. With tough economic times, a lot of these companies are going to be in trouble, so those that start waking up to the fact that fat, slow to load widgets suck may have longer futures than the rest.

Introducing the Direct Chat Ad Widget

JR — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 16:01:58 +0000

The idea of the interactive ad widget is being taken a step further with a new acquisition by a major ad network. Traffic Marketplace has bought out Livemarkets, a company that’s developed technology to build real-time chat into advertising banners.

The idea is to let the advertiser make himself available to customers and connect with them, right inside the ad itself. The process doesn’t require any extra downloads and doesn’t navigate you away from the page. The chat system is set up to route requests to any available agent within the advertiser’s office, or to send overflow requests to call centers trained to handle the inquiries.

All in all, this actually isn’t a half-bad idea for the 2.0 world. If it’s done well and placed on the right types of pages, it could add a valuable layer of interaction that’d be helpful to customers as well as to the company. Of course, it could also result in a lot of “prank” chats, but I think that’s where proper placement on the right types of pages comes into play.

Livemarkets has been around since last year. This acquisition, however, will mark its first mainstream distribution channel since its inception. Terms of the agreement aren’t being made public.

No related posts.

Facebook Gambles with Social Advertising — Will It Pay Off?

JR — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 23:28:58 +0000

Facebook is trying to mine precious advertising value from its young, computer-savvy userbase with a new “social advertising” approach. Our prediction: It will either present a huge profit or a huge disaster.

The plan, currently being tested in small doses but not yet formally announced, is basically to treat the ads like the rest of the site. You’ll be able to leave comments, share virtual gifts with other users, or become a fan — the equivalent of a friend in a normal profile. The whole thing is really just an interactive widget, only customized to look and act like typical social media content.

You can see why advertisers would latch onto the idea. If people are becoming engaged with their ad, they’re more likely to look at it, spend time on it, and refer other people to it. Initial advertising success, of course, is measured largely by click-through rates, so attracting people and bringing them back repeatedly can have great benefit.

But here’s the thing: We all know how obnoxious some folks can become when hidden behind the masks of their monitors. Imagine the kind of immature comments you sometimes see on blogs and news sites — then imagine how much more frequent and offensive they could become when the content itself is an ad. Most Facebook users are probably smart enough to pick out commercials. Will they tear the companies a new one, right on their own paid spots? Or just ignore the things altogether?

In the long run, one could theorize that clicks are clicks — and even if people are leaving remarks that belittle the company, they’re still spending the time and giving their click-gold. At the same time, though, the company’s end goal is to achieve marketing success. A flame-filled ad may deliver a short-term goal of traffic numbers but may ultimately undermine the company’s campaign and not pay off in the end.

So will Facebook hit the jackpot on this one? Or will it be a short-lived, fast-failed experiment? Time, soon enough, will tell.

Facebook