StickiWidgets

Caught this over at TechCrunch. eBay has launched a new service to help distribute listings and increase viral marketing. Bloggers and users alike can now easily post an “eBay To Go” widget of interesting eBay listings or search results. There are 3 different widgets that can be obtained by going to the eBay To Go site and following the simple steps.

There are a few things to point out.

1. There is no option the grab a widget from the actual listing page.
2. What happens if the listing is over? (single listing widget)
3. There is no revenue share at this time.

We haven’t tested the widgets so it would be interesting to see what happens when the listing expires. Keep an eye below in about 8 days.

Understandably, this is in beta and currently for amusement. But, there is potential here for eBay to expand this to include revenue sharing and distribution of the widget via the listing pages. Even without the revenue share, it would be a good move if they added the ability to grab a widget from the item page.

This will increase eBay’s reach. Other third party sites and developers have been building tools for some time now. Let’s see what eBay can do in-house. (Maybe this is why they didn’t add revenue share, so not to kill off third party tools.)

An example is below or visit the eBay To Go test blog for an example of all three widgets.

Update (2007.04.25): Here is the “official” announcement by Tom when you log into your MySpace profile.

Latest Update: Apr 25, 2007 12:00pm, PST

Hey everybody, we just launched another program to stop dirty spammers from hasseling you. When you input a link in myspace it may be converted to a redirect link. You’ll start seeing them around the site. They look like this: msplinks.com/adf9sd9f. These links are legit and we are creating them. They are not viruses or whatever else your conspiracy theorist friends told you. They still point to their original url, but let us easily turn off links to spam, phishing, or virus sites. booyah!

News and speculations has been circling on the new changes to links within comments on MySpace. It appears that MySpace recently rolled out a change in which links in comments are posted as an encoded link from http://www.msplinks.com/. So, if you post a link to http://stickiwidgets.com in a comment, it will show up as something like http://www.msplinks.com/somerandomcodehere. As with the typical MySpace changes, this only applies to new comments and old comments are intact.

This change has many implications as other have suggested and pointed out. MySpace will have much more control over comment links now. They will be able to filter, redirect, approve, deny and track outgoing links. This may not necessarily be a bad thing, but it all depends on what they do with this power. Based on history though, it doesn’t look good. MySpace has blocked external links from Flash widgets and blocked some domains entirely .

One effect is that links in MySpace comments will no longer provide any link backs and SEO benefits. This can be good in cutting down on comment spammers, whether intentional or not. However, we’re not entirely convinced that MySpace is doing this purely to protect its users from comment spam.

IdgetsWay has an interesting post on widgets making its way to the Apple TV. Unfortunately, it all looks to be hacks and not official Apple releases. The new hack is brought to us by AwkwardTV and is currently in private beta. We do not have much information regarding the AwkwardTV Loader hack or the various widgets/plugins. There does appear to be some RSS, weather and sports widgets during the beta test. For more information, check out the IdgetsWay post or AwkwardTV.

There are multiple hacks and plugins posted on the AwkwardTV site so we are not sure which one the following statement on the site refers too, but these hacks in general are definitely not for the faint of heart. In regards to the AwkwardTV widget loader, it does appear that once the loader is installed, the installation of widgets over the net is quite simple and easy.

By the way, opening the box voids warranty. That should be clear. - AwkwardTV

Here is a video showing the ease of installing new widgets via the AwkwardTV Loader. However, it doesn’t show what’s involved in getting the Loader itself installed.