Sticki Widgets

It looks like Stickam is updating their site again. These changes broke some of our widgets and services so please be patient while we fix the issues. We should be able to resolve the problems without any changes or updates to the widgets themselves. However, we will be waiting till later today to address these problems. Since these change were unannounced and we are not completely sure of all the changes, we want to make sure all of the dust settles before we go in and start cleaning up.

If there are specific issues or bugs you would like us to address, feel free to email us with your comments and requests. Check the About Us page for our contact info.

Update (2006.11.17 @ 6:00 AM): Stickam rolled back their site changes sometime yesterday. We can not tell if it’s a full or partial rollback of all changes but the site is back to what it was before. This means, for now, our widgets and services are also working again.

Update (2006.11.13 @ 4:45 PM): Looks like Stickam is still experiencing problems from their updates and maintenance. Unfortunately, we can’t really do much on our end until they resolve their issues. As soon as that happens, we will update our services and widgets.

There’s an open source web conferencing project gaining popularity over at SourceForge. It looks to be a very interesting project and promises a lot of features. Unfortunately, it’s currently in alpha and seems to be rough around the edges still. However, if they can deliver everything they promise with ease of use, installation and a cost effective hosted solution, then they will have many small business owners waiting in line.

There is another audience they could also be targeting. Many web sites are still run by hobbyists and non-technical individuals. Having to go over to SourceForge, downloading something and then installing it on a web server is beyond a lot of site owners. A simple hosted solution where people just need to cut and paste a few lines of code would be great; this is in the plans according to the demo. The question is how much will it cost and what features will it have?

While not directly comparable in feature set, Userplane has many different price points depending on usage with or without ad support. 1videoConference could do the same with a tiered pricing structure and feature set. Want a plain video presentation hosted platform? Get it with ads for free. Need a video conference system with no ads? It’s a nominal price of x dollars a month. Want the whole enchilada with whiteboard support and collaborative tools? That will be an additional fee, thank you very much…

We will keep an eye on this one and see how it develops and differentiates itself from the others.

[via TechCrunch]

Saw a post over a TechCrunch about Fox Interactive Media’s SpringWidgets so we went to check it out. This offering is interesting. While there are plenty of other widgets platforms out there, Michael Arrington points out that SpringWidgets is currently the only one that is bridging the gap and targeting both the desktop and web.

There are only a handful of widgets listed on the site, still in Beta. Two of the widgets are below, Scoreboard and RSS Reader. SpringWidgets provides an easy to use configuration tool to set the size of the widgets. We have not downloaded or tested the desktop engine or the development API so those will be left for another review.

Overall, the site and widgets are easy to use and do what they are intended for. We will have to wait and see if they are able to develop more interesting widgets and if the developer community picks up on their platform.

It will also be interesting to see what Fox is willing to push through their new platform. We think that there is a huge opportunity for Fox to leverage their “content”, such as the Scoreboard. There is already a following for their existing media; sports, shows, movies, etc. Fans and bloggers will jump at the chance to have these widgets providing official content along side their own, a hockey blog with the NHL Scoreboard widget or a TV show fan and a widget with Fox supplied content on their MySpace profile.

Update (2006.11.6): SpringWidgets is also getting some coverage over at Read/WriteWeb and Mashable.