StickiWidgets

This is a widget we built for fun, so there’s no review, just info.

Where would like to go today? is a widget for checking out places through Google Maps and photos of nearby destinations.

• Enter a location and click “Go!”
• You will be presented with a map of your location and photos of nearby places
• Use this to help plan your next trip or travels
• Use this to daydream
• Or, use this to just get away for a few minutes
• Click on “Get & Share” to get or put this widget on your favorite site/location
• Default location changes based on our own interests at any given moment

As always, feedback and suggestions are always welcomed.

Enjoy your trip around the world…

Powered by: Google Maps and Clearspring

Hulu announced and opened up Hulu Labs yesterday. Hulu Labs is a place for the company to share experimental projects and obtain feedback from users. There are currently 4 projects listed on the page.

Hulu Desktop

Hulu Desktop is a lean-back viewing experience for your personal computer. It features a sleek new look that’s optimized for use with standard Windows Media Center remote controls or Apple remote controls, allowing you to navigate Hulu’s entire library with just six buttons.

The Video Panel Designer

Video Panels are easy-to-use embeddable widgets that allow simple content programming and easily integrate a Hulu video player. The Video Panel Designer tool helps site editors and Web masters customize and program Video Panels to fit their needs.

Recommendations

Recommendations are a list of TV shows and movies that we think you’ll love based on videos you’ve already watched and rated on Hulu. Anyone with a Hulu account can access these recommendations: log in or sign up for a free account and select the Recommendations tab found on your Profile page.

Time-Based-Browsing

Time-Based Browsing allows you to quickly scan our videos grouped by original air date. Whether you’re a TV junkie who remembers shows by the day of week they air, a budding media anthropologist curious to study TV’s evolution across the decades, or just a user in search of timely news clips, time-based browsing is another way to easily find more videos on Hulu.

Keeping in line with the theme of this blog we will take a look at The Video Panel Designer. The Video Panel is an embeddable widget that allow users to program and display Hulu videos. The Video Panel Designer tool is an easy designer tool that allows a user to easily configure a customized widget to fit their own style and display the programming they choose.

The design interface is pretty simple to use and offers a good number of customizations from size to color to windowing options for the video player. Additionally, you have access to the library of Hulu videos.

We’ve embeded the widget displaying full length episodes from NBC’s The Office below. Clicking on the video will open the video player positioned in the middle of the browser window (user configurable option).

Overall, this is a pretty standard widget in the current widget landscape. What it has above others (arguable) is the library of high quality content.

However, there’s one key feature that is missing. Sharing…. We’re not sure why you cannot share the widget. It seems this would be the perfect way to increase reach and audience. Not only that, there’s not even a link back to the Labs page where someone can go customize their own.

Congratulations to Hooman and the gang over at Clearspring.

According to Comscore, over 520 million unique viewers each month is the reach of Clearspring’s sharing platform. That makes Clearspring the largest distributed sharing platform on the web covering half of the people on the internet worldwide.

Here’s a great write up/interview over at ReadWriteWeb,
Clearspring Sees What 1/2 The Internet is Doing (API Coming Soon).

Hooman also posted some information on his blog regarding some upcoming updates to AddThis. Here’s a snippet from his post Moving to One Sharing Platform – AddThis vision being realized…

“Before, AddThis specialized in enabling users to share links back to your website. Now with our API, you can also enable your users to post embeddable content like videos, photos and more – taking your site experience with them. We have leveraged our experience with widgets at Clearspring to provide a simple approach that we think will be truly powerful. We’ll be doing another update to this capability soon that will enable even more of the powerful widget-sharing functionality from Clearspring to be leveraged via AddThis.”

We’re looking forward to what interesting things Clearspring has in the works. Sounds like they’ve got some great things lined up.

Down in the dumps, bored, laid off, need a break or just want to dream?

Here are some widgets from Tripbase.com to get you started.

Each of the widgets does something different.

• Travel Weather and Season Predictor: Enter a destination, month and get the weather prediction with information about the travel season.
• Travel Cost Calculator: Enter a destination and it spits out the “estimated” daily cost. You can specify Budget, Mid range or Luxury and your choice of 3 currencies.
• Travel Picture of the Day: Auto updates daily with a new vacation picture to distract you from what you’re suppose to be doing.

Overall, the 3 widgets are nice and simple. We can see how they would be interesting and add value to a site or blog. One thing we really liked is the input suggestions and auto complete on the destination input fields. It definitely makes it easier to input and get the right destinations.

Here are some things we would have liked to see.

• Move the HTML based widget link into the widget itself. We don’t believe the SEO value on that widget link back should be the primary SEO play.
• Replace the above mentioned link back with a SEO optimized link back to the site with the “correct” keywords.
• Utilize a better widget distribution model, maybe Clearspring or Gigya.
• More user configurations like size, layout or color.
• Maybe an all-in-one widget combining the three.
• When a user inputs a destination, generate a link to the search results page for that destination.
• Tag each vacation photo with the “Location/Destination” of that photo and link the user to the search results page for that destination.

Tripbase free travel blog widgets

Get free travel blog widget

Add Tripbase blog widget

We started checking out the Tripbase.com site after taking a look at the widgets and noticed a couple of things.

First, we came across the Caribbean Vacation Ideas page that looked perfect for widgitizing. The page provides a tool for users to enter some criteria and receive a listing of results for vacation ideas. All that really needs to be done is give the user some options on layout and size, then let it loose. When ever a user clicks on a suggested vacation take the user back to Tripbase.com. Minimal amount of work to drive branding, marketing and traffic. If you wanted to get fancy, you can even add an SEO tail for some link love and advanced user configurations like color and default search.

Second, the top navigation is not present on the home page. This seems very strange. We’re not sure why this is the case. Anyone have any ideals why this would be a “good” thing?

Our March Madness Widget for the 2009 NCAA Tournament Bracket has been updated for the 2009 Tourney. Again, it was built for personal use so it’s pretty limited. The bracket currently updates every 60 seconds so it’s a good way to keep up to date with the scores.

The current default view is the EAST Region. However, you can select from the EAST, MIDWEST, SOUTH, WEST or ELITE EIGHT brackets as the default view when you grab the widget. If you decide to change he default view later, just grab the code again and select the new view as the default.

This widget has also been enabled as a Facebook App and Google Gadget.

Don’t forget about the free live video streams, March Madness on Demand…
New for 2009: Watch in High Quality (HQ)