Widgetoko

The Wink search engine searches social network profiles, like myspace, for your term.

A search for the term 'widget' returned a pile of myspace profiles with the screen name 'Widget'. Makes sense I guess.

The other day Wink quietly launched a new widget for organizing all your social network profiles into one widget.

After creating a profile on the Wink site, you add links to online profiles like myspace, Flickr, YouTube, MyBlogLog, Facebook, Last.fm, LinkedIn, etc, etc, etc.

It's not hard these days to have a dozen or more profiles, so the Wink widget is a wicked way for summarizing links to all. Use the widget to promote all your various profiles and/or to just keep things organized.

Available in three flavors - HTML/JavaScript, Flash and as an Image

This is one of the few widgets that I actually find useful and provides some value, if just for the fact it helps keep a list of all our profiles organized and accessible from one spot.

Answers.com released a new widget for bloggers today called AnswerTips.

Site owners drop a <script> block into their page and then whenever a visitor double-clicks a piece of text a bubble with information opens up.

Try it out right now. Double click on any text.

"AnswerTips are small information bubbles that define any word when double-clicked. An AnswerTips-enabled site or blog means visitors get fast facts on 4 million topics provided by Answers.com when they double-click on any word, without opening a new browser or following outbound links. AnswerTips deliver instant definitions, explanations and facts including biographies, tech terms, geography, pop culture and much more."

I did a quick hallway test and reactions were positive but the bubble tips are unexpected. I'm not sure how many users actually double-click on text, rather than click-and-swipe to highlight. Thoughts?

I'm a constant clicker-double-clicker to highlight text to copy into the clipboard and the bubble does not interfere with that process. Clicking back on the page closes the bubble, which is nice.

If you create music, BlastMyMusic.com has created a new Flash based widget for selling your tunes.

As the band, you create a profile on the BlastMyMusic.com website, upload your tracks, then drop the widget into your website, blog, myspace, facebook, etc.

Purchased music is DRM free MP3's.

ClockLink provides embeddable Flash clocks.

Digital, analog, themed, you name it.

It's nice to be able to give my brain a rest and work with a good old fashion widget. No email required, no account to create and a simple config.

A relatively useless widget, but whatever. Good for some bling I guess.

Embeddable Flash based widget to display your LinkedIn profile.

Amazon affiliates can now embed an "aStore" widget (iFrame) store within a web page.

The embedded store is fairly wide and there does not appear to be options for changing the width, so many will have to create unique pages or link off-site to the Amazon hosted page.

Here's our Widgetoko aStore.

Speaking of yourminis.com, yesterday we got a bit of inside info...

"We [yourminis.com] are working on a big release right now that will include public APIs, desktop widgets (leveraging the Apollo platform), and a redesign of the yourminis site and community....stay tuned! "

... excellent.

The Apollo platform is being developed by Adobe Labs and from what I can tell seems like next gen Flash, but runs on the desktop (OSX & Win) like an operating system. More Apollo Q&A.

The yourminis "public API" certainly caught my attention as well. Maybe a little "build your own" widget kit? Who knows, but they got me wanting more.

An interesting change in the widget space recently is the ability to 'export' widgets from the dashboard sites and drop into your blog. About a month ago the personalized dashboard service yourminis.com pushed out functionally for users to export their widgets (Flash based) and embed into their "online identities" including social site like myspace and Facebook, your blog or any other website.

To export a yourminis widget, mouse-over the widget and a "copy me" link should appear in the top-right corner.

Yesterday we used a yourminis.com widget to display a Yahoo!pipes mashup called YouTunes.

The other day Yahoo! released "pipes". A drag and drop interface which allows you to combine several feeds into one, using results from the first to manipulate (filter, sort, count, etc.) results from the second (and so on).

Initial impressions of the user interface blew me away. At first I thought pipes was Flash based, but it's all AJAX. Frick'n brilliant. The whole AJAX based drag/drag stretchy/shrinky connection points is a first for me.

That said, it does take some brain power to figure out how this machine works. At the moment there is little to no documentation, few tutorials and some of the fundamental functionality like filtering by Dates does not work (yet). The forums do seem pretty active with useful tips.

The service reminds me of database query generators.

With all this talk of generating custom feeds from data where no feed exists, and now piping them all into Yahoo! to perform data manipulation, things are getting exciting.

For instance, Nick Bradbury (HomeSite, TopStyle & FeedDemon) created a demonstration pipe which gets the iTunes Top 10 feed, pushes those results into a YouTube search, which returns an RSS feed of Videos for each Top 10 track. Très cool.

Now what? How about adding the new YouTunes feed to a yourminis.com YouTube video widget, plopping onto your blog and mashing up the place.

Adding the Criteo AutoRoll widget to your blog will display links to other blogs your readers should like. Kind of like how Google Adsense works, but displays links to relevant blogs instead of advertising. AutoRoll requires sign-up and simple size/color configuration.

Criteo gets my vote for simply being based in Paris, France. J'aime Paris.