Looks like Clearspring is looking for a widget developer. Interesting.

Widgetbox just released a Facebook App Accelerator for widgets in their gallery. It lets developers easily convert their widgets in to Facebook applications. I had the privilege of trying it out before they launched it publicly and I can vouch for its awesomeness. There is a straight-forward list of steps to complete in order to add your widget as a Facebook app. I used it to make 21 of our widgets in to applications and averaged about 10 minutes per application. (3.5 Hours? Wow!) and it worked almost flawlessly each time.

The one time I did have trouble I had accidentally copied something in to the wrong for field. This is something that could probably be remedy but it would require more cooperation between the two companies.

The only real drawback that I see is that instead of making the widget available in the user’s Facebook profile, only an icon and description are displayed with a link to a canvas page that houses the widget. After emailing the people at Widgetbox they said that it is something that they may work toward changing in the future. For now, however, it is nice but also a little disappointing.

All in all, it is a pretty rock solid piece of technology. Good Job.

The RSS Scroller widget is now resizable. Hooray!

Muse Storm is a new widget content and syndication platform. Its kind of neat. I guess. But it looks like that, among other things, their widgets are just our RSS Scroller but with more customization options. Granted they also provide you with analytics and other widget form factors like desktop widgets, but still - not offering a whole lot more that what is already available.

I think they are trying to appeal to the content producer, saying “use our system to provide your audience widgets.” That is a great idea, however, I feel that people that really want a custom widget for their site -branded, custom features, etc. - won’t be satisfied with just a cookie-cutter widget that will look and function like all the rest.

But, I do not actually know what they are trying to do, so there you go. We try not to take ourselves too seriously here at WidgetNest.

(As an aside, I am sure we are not the first people to think up the “+ Add this widget” phraseology but since we have started doing that on our own widgets I have seen a lot more that look exactly like ours. I am probably just being vain.)

Team WidgetNest is happy to annouce that we have chosen Widgetbox as our exclusive distribution partner. Using the Widgetbox system will help us to focus on widget development and not have to worry about integrating in to different platforms. Our widgets will be available anywhere Widgetbox widgets can go, which is a lot of places. In light of this partnership, we have updated our site to reflect the change. Now each widget page provides a link to the proper page on Widgetbox where a user can get their widget.

We are looking forward to working with Widgetbox and we are excited by this unique opportunity.

Not that there are very many people that read this blog (yet), but we will be updating our site tonight and making a few announcements as well. Until then, take care.

-Team WidgetNest

Netscape.com’s Digg-like social network has been moved to a new url and has been given a new name, Propeller. In light of this change, we have updated our Netscape news widget to reflect the new name. We did this because we do not want to be misleading. The news was no longer coming from Netscape.com and we did not want the people seeing the widget to be mistaken. Thanks for understanding.

Been playing around inside of Facebook. Awesome development platform. It really is amazing, but I am also worried about its viability as a long standing solution. Its good to know it now, of course, but what happens next year when everyone leaves for a different social network? Anyway, thats an argument for another day.

Somehow we managed to kill comments. We will get those working soon. Probably.

UPDATE: Comments are now fixed.

Our two latest widgets:

I can has cheezburger

Technorati Blog Response

Both of these widgets are a result of slow work days. The I Can Has Cheezeburger widget shows the latest pics from the lolcat blog icanhascheezburger.com. The Technorati widget, when placed on a website, shows the latest blog entries from the web about that website.

There are some pretty cool projects going on in the background. I wish I could say more about them but we don’t want to give our enemies the competition any details. Not that we have much competition. Speaking of which, we should start a widget prank war somehow. Or some kind of widget race. Yeah. Anyway, we will keep you posted.