StickiWidgets

Team USA has been promoting their athletes and the upcoming 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver with a couple of widgets. With the games just 8 days away, we thought we should take a closer look at the widgets.

The widgets themselves are pretty straight forward. The 2 widgets are essentially the same widget in 2 sizes. Both widgets are 300 pixels wide with one being a standard IAB 300×250 pixels. In each widget you get video and athlete content along side a twitter feed. The twitter feed is a nice touch as it gives the widget fresh content more quickly and engages the visitors in the conversation.

As standard practice, you can share this widget and this is where the widget gets interesting for us. Now that Clearspring has announce the end of their Launchpad platform in favor of the AddThis product, a few key items have surfaced as a result of the transition to the AddThis sharing platform.

Built-in gadget, app and embed sharing are now gone as they are not currently supported by AddThis. Google gadgets has been replaced with Google Bookmarks, apps were replaced with stream/feed posts and embeds are now up to the widget coders to support on their own. These changes are not necessarily bad, but they were nice features within Launchpad (not to mention a slew of other features but we’ll save that for another post).

So far so good, even with the loss of the Google Gadgets and Facebook/MySpace Apps.

However, we believe there’s one big flaw in the way the AddThis is utilized within this widget. This is not a flaw in the AddThis platform, it is a integration issue. If you take a closer look at the sharing links, you will notice that the widget is passing the following links and sending users to them.

http://www.teamusawidget.org/big/

http://www.teamusawidget.org/small/

This makes sense as these pages display the widgets for visitors to view and grab if they like. But, it greatly under values the widget.

There really should be a page on the main teamusa.org site which hosts these widget pages. By doing that and sharing those pages, you will drive traffic to the main site rather than a stub page. You gain 2 benefits here.

1. Driving traffic to teamusa.org is significantly more valuable than teamusawidget.org. Teamusa.org is the site you want everyone to link to and talk about.
2. Teamusawidget.org is relatively a dead-end.
   • Yes, if the content in the widget is interesting, users may click through to the main site.
   • However, if the page is on the main site, you give the user access to everything on the site through header navigation, footer navigation and supporting content on page. If the widget interests them, they can grab it or click through. If the widget is not not interesting, you have now also given them a vast amount of content and navigation to go explore, increasing the likelihood of user engagement

The URL value is already being set and passed to AddThis within the widget code. Changing that value is trivial. The work would be in building out the widget page on the main Team USA site, which we imagine is also a simple task.

Lastly, since they are already controlling the embed code being used, they should consider adding a HTML link in the embed code. That way they can add SEO value to widgets being embedded on other sites. Some people may remove it, but given the subject matter and cut/paste there will be enough people who leave the code as-is to be of value to the linked site.

The stage is set for the NFL Pro Bowl and Super Bowl Sundays. Get this widget to keep up-to-date with the latest news in the NFL heading into the Pro Bowl and the Super Bowl games.

This widget comes equipped with a game countdown, news headlines, roster and twitter feed. You can also “Grab” your own copy, powered by gigya.

Pro Bowl – Sun, Jan 31st @ 7:30 PM ET. on NBC
Super Bowl – Sun, Feb 7th @ 6:00 PM ET. on CBS

What’s your picks, predictions or hopes?

Or, are you just watching for the commercials?

The AddThis Sharebar was released into beta back on December 17, 2009. We’ve played around with it on a couple of sites and generally it’s been a good experience. Getting the code and deploying on a site is dead simple, just copy and paste some code. Out of the box you get the all the sharing features as you would expect. One of the features we really liked is the personalized services feature. What that does is it presents a list of personalized sharing options based on the user. So, if I share to Twitter more frequently than any other service, the Twitter icon would be the first option. You don’t have to lock yourself into a specific list of services, just let AddThis manage the personalized list of top services for each individual.

There were a couple of things we thought AddThis could have done better on. While there are a good number of customizations and options available, we felt that it could be expanded. For example, something like a fixed width on the Sharebar to match that of the site. The AddThis staff have indicated they are evaluating more customization options and will add them as appropriate.

Another thing we didn’t like initially was the hardcoded link to Yahoo search. However, in this case, a few people (we were among those people) posted in the forum requesting the ability to turn off or customize the search link. Within days, the AddThis developers released the feature to disable or customize the search link. Upon providing feedback, their team was able to quickly provide another update to address our issues. The result can be seen on this site. If you do a search from the Sharebar you will be directed to the Google CSE (Custom Search Engine) that’s integrated into this site. This is perfect for what we wanted.

Overall, the AddThis Sharebar is looking like it’s going to be a pretty decent product. There are somethings that could be improved upon, but this is a beta so they get a little slack there. If they can keep up the rapid development of the product, as they have shown with the search feature updates, then they are well positioned to succeed. However, it won’t be easy as there are a few other people in this space.

AddThis was acquired by Clearspring back in 2008

Here’s a widget from NVIDIA to help their consumers find and update their drivers. This widget will allow site owners to provide a quick and easy tool for their users to find NVIDIA drivers.

The widget has two methods for finding drivers.

• use the usual form of dropdown lists to filter and search
• use the auto detection tool to scan a user’s system

This is public service announcement and not a widget review. It is nice to see the government embrace widgets as a means to communicate and extend their reach. There are improvements that could be made in regards to the widgets, but we won’t mention them here as to not distract from the purpose of the widgets.

Below are 6 informational widgets on H1N1 (Swine Flu) from the CDC.