One of the main goals of widgets is to make various platforms accessible to users. Widgets bring together these platforms, making it much easier to share information with other people. And this is exactly what PlayXpert had in mind when they came up with the idea of the PlayXpert Twitter Widget.
CNET reports:
Combining two of the most addictive things about the online universe—Twitter and World of Warcraft—seems like a good way to bring productivity in the Western world to a screeching halt.
If that happens, you can blame PlayXpert, a maker of various in-game widgets for PC gamers. The company today announced the PlayXpert Twitter Widget, adding Twitter functionality to the existing PlayXpert software, which works with WoW and other online PC games.
In-game widget engines such as PlayXpert (which bills itself as an “in-game operating system”) run alongside PC games, offering voice chat, Web browsing, and other tools for players, without the need to quit or ATL+TAB out of the game to launch another app (popular examples include Xfire and Steam).
“A screeching halt” is but an understatement, I think. Having personal experience with both Twitter and World of Warcraft, I am pretty sure that a large number of people will get hooked even more. And you know what the best thing about this new widget is? You can download it for free – along with other widgets – at PlayXpert’s web site.
I can now see critics (of spending too much time playing games) shaking their heads right now.
Do you feel like joining a contest? You might want to hear about the latest thing going on at Library Things, which is actually a widget contest. They recently released a group of new widgets, which I think are actually pretty cool. The widgets were released with predefined styles but the possibility of modifying them was also included. Given this, they are conducting a contest. Here are the rules:
• Submit your widgets to this Talk thread (http://www.librarything.com/topic/61668)
• Widgets can be of any type—as simple, complex, staid or way-out as you like. You can use your own CSS or JavaScript, but you certainly don’t have to.
• You can submit up to five widgets, but post only one message. Edit if you need to.
• If you want, share where you put the widget, or where you plan to.
• Go ahead and name your widgets, comment on what you were trying to do.
• Post the “Share with other LibraryThing members” link (e.g., this). Posting the script won’t work.
And what will you get for your efforts? If you win the people behind Library Things will choose your widget to be part of the standard set. Five members will also win memberships, which can be transferrable. There are other prizes at stake, so if I were you, I’d visit the blog and figure out what you need to do.
Oh, by the way, I think that you know that you need to know how to work around those codes, right?
In the past years, blogging has reached unprecedented heights. We can find blogs focusing on just about anything. Indeed, we can find blogs without any apparent focus at all. No matter, the fact is that blogging is something that is HUGE in every sense of the word.
One thing that I like about blogging is that you can do so much with the venue. Blogs are malleable and versatile that you can perform countless tweaks to make your own personal stamp on them. One way to do this would be to use widgets. More than personalizing the blog, however, widgets can actually be used for promotion and monetization. That is why I have been looking at some of the best and most useful Blogger widgets that I can find for my personal blog. Here are some ideas, which can help you in your search as well.
Most commented posts.
I have seen a lot of blogs with this information available in one of the sidebars. I think that it is a brilliant idea to showcase those posts which have received the most comments. In this way, you can attract more readers to those posts and hopefully get more comments in the process.
Related posts.
This widget is easier to find for Wordpress blogs, but I have been having a hard time finding a widget that works well with my Blogger blog. I think it is important to have a related posts widget since it helps your reader find other posts in your blog which may be of interest to them as well.
Tweet this.
Twitter is another phenomenon that has reached far and widget. If you want to reach more people, provide a widget that allows readers to tweet about your post – free advertising for you!
In this time of economic uncertainty, more and more people are once again returning to an old habit. That is, the use of coupons to make savings. In the old days, people would regularly buy the newspaper (especially the Sunday edition) so that they can spend a considerable amount of time clipping those coupons which will end up making them savings. Actually, let me correct myself – I think that a lot of people still do this today.
Of course, for those who spend a lot of time online, there is another kind of coupon for them – the electronic version. With this new widget from Fabulous Savings, you can keep track of the most updated coupons even more easily. This widget can be downloaded for free, giving you the latest coupons that you can use when shopping. One good thing about the coupons that you can find from this widget is that they are not limited to food items or grocery items only. You can actually find coupons for most anything under the sun!
Michael Yack, the founder of Fabulous Savings, shares that “this widget is a great resource for all consumers. We wanted to make information easy and valuable. That’s why we decided to offer our National Retailer coupons through our inaugural widget and let everyone save money.”
What stores are participating? There are a lot but here are some of the most popular ones: Target, Macy’s, Best Buy, Toys R Us, and Wal-Mart. I don’t know about you, but I am going to find this widget now.
Have you ever heard of Chatterous? I would not be surprised if you had not heard of them until now. It is actually a start up company, which has the main idea of offering venues to chat using whatever platform you prefer.
Let’s say you have a blog or a web site. The idea is that by embedding Chatterous onto your site, you will be able to chat with other users. Venture Beat gives more details on how Chatterous works:
The chat widget does exactly what you’d expect — it’s a way to embed a Chatterous chat on your website or blog. Of course, there are many, many other chat widgets out there, but Chatterous brings its own spin on the concept. Rather than simply integrating all your communication tools, Chatterous lets you choose one method — such as email, instant messaging, or SMS text messaging — then you can participate in a chat with people using other methods. So you’ve got multiple channels leading into one conversation. The chat widget is just another aspect of that strategy, adding another way users can watch and participate in the conversation. If you add the chat widget to, say, your blog, visitors can read and participate in the conversation on-site — but people don’t have to visit your site; in fact most of the chat participants can be still be emailing, IMing, etc.
I actually like that idea – being able to participate in a chat using various platforms, such as e-mail. While it is not that hard to gain access to chat these days, there are still some circumstances that might prove to be challenging (like when you’re at work and all you can access is e-mail).
When the Samsung Omnia came out, it was touted as one of the iPod killers. At that time, I was pretty skeptical. After all, it is very hard to overcome the hype that Apple products always come with. Months down the road, it seems that the Omnia is living up to the expectations of its fans.
For those of you who have a Samsung Omnia, one of the things that you might have noticed missing is the capability for lotsa widgets. I can imagine how frustrating this could be. I may not have a Samsung Omnia but I do know how cool widgets for mobile phones are and as cool as an Omnia can be, it just doesn’t live up to its potential if it does not have widgets.
So here’s the good news – Samsung has recently released a new ROM, which includes new widgets. The ROM was only released on the 11th of March and is still in the beta version. From what I hear, some of the widgets that are already active include a stocks widget, a news widget, a weather widget, and a Google and Yahoo search widget. There is also a section for “more widgets,” but unfortunately, it is not functional as of yet. And that is why perhaps some people are waiting for the more stable version of the ROM to come out before downloading it. If I had the Omnia, though, I would download the beta version and find out for myself.
Who doesn’t hate being stuck in the middle of traffic? I know I do. Just last Friday, I found myself wasting about an hour sitting in the car, waiting for Friday night traffic to let up so I could get to my destination. Friday nights is really one of the worst times to go out. Everyone and their moms seems to need to be somewhere in a real hurry and the city streets are just so full of people trying to be ahead of one another.
While widgets will not probably physically get rid of all the cars on the road, having a widget to at least know the conditions on the road will be quite helpful. At least, if you know just how bad the traffic is, you can find an alternative route or stay where you are till the conditions get better.
And that’s what the TomTom HD Traffic Widget can do for you. This Traffic Widget is compatible with some of the most popular sites that we use on a constant basis – Facebook, iGoogle, and Bebo. It offers real time information on traffic. It also offers customization – you can indicate a particular place and monitor the traffic in and around that area. Using this customization feature, the TomTom widget can also calculate the additional time that it will take you to travel from one point to another, based on the current traffic situation. The widget constantly refreshes itself, giving you only the most up to date information.
And the best thing about it? It can be downloaded for free!
These days, it’s not simply all about attracting people to visit your web site. The idea is to get the information out, to disseminate the information in as easy a way as possible. And that is why widgets have become so popular.
Indeed, their usefulness is highlighted not only by the countless widgets that we use for sports and other pursuits of leisure. In fact, even the United States government has turned to widgets to disseminate information. Take the Center for Disease Control (CDC) for example. They have created a widget that automatically publishes important information regarding critical cases.
It’s not only the CDC that is making use of widgets. The Ohio Attorney General’s Office makes use of Twitter, which has its own widgets that can be placed in web sites.
Mitch Wagner of Information Week recently wrote a feature on this “movement” in the government:
One of the ways that social media changes the Web is that social media require you take your message to the people. The game is no longer about attracting people to your Web site—it’s about bringing your content to Twitter and other people’s Web sites. That’s a lesson that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) put into practice in the recent recall of tainted peanut-butter, and that the Ohio Attorney General is using for home foreclosure information.
I am sure that widget developers are aware of this and that they are scrambling to get the deals to develop widgets for government agencies. On our part, we have more widgets to make use of!
Got a sports blog? Or maybe you just like sports and you would like to let the rest of the world know about your passion? Whatever your reason may be for liking sports, you can’t get any better than the widgets that ESPN has to offer. I have been seeing a lot of these widgets in my sport-loving friends’ sites but I never really took the time to check the choices out for myself. So I did just that today.
Surprisingly, there are quite a lot of widgets on offer in the ESPN Widget Center. Perhaps the most general and yet useful widget is the ESPN Top Story widget. It is perfect for those who are into anything related to sports. As the name implies, the widget shows various happenings in the world of sports – the hottest and freshest stories only, by the way.
I particularly like basketball, however, so I prefer the NBA Top Story widget. I find it perfect for my needs because I do not have enough time to follow each game and always check up on what is happening in the NBA. This widget can give me a glimpse into the most important news.
There is also the Team Widget – or widgets, rather. You can choose your favorite team and get a widget all about them. Being a San Antonio Spurs fan, I will be getting the code for this widget and adding it to my personal blog NOW. So what are you waiting for? Any sport, any team – you’ll find it in the ESPN Widget Center. I can’t believe it took me this long to discover this!
What are your plans for tonight? If you are a fan of the day of love, then I suppose that you had made plans weeks ago. If you are like me, though, your idea of a romantic Valentines Day may be limited to a nice steak meal and some Valentines themed posts and widgets. If you are liking the latter idea, then here are a couple of interesting widgets that will help you share the love today.
The I Love You Widget
Scared of actually saying the three words out loud? Why not make the Internet do the work for you? Get the I Love You Widget here and post it wherever you think it should be posted. I was thinking that it would look good in any blog and that it would definitely be perfect for the weekend. It does not really do much – it’s just a bunch of cute letters and a heart floating above the clouds – but if cute is what you’re going for, then this would work perfectly. This widget can be posted in a blog, a web site, your desktop, or even your phone.
Love E-cards
I love e-cards, who doesn’t? They are perfect for any occasion and you get to save some trees while at it! This widget is not new but it is perfect for Valentines weekend. You are sure to get a lot of hits as I can just imagine the large number of people trying to send love e-cards at the last minute.
Happy Valentines!
