StickiWidgets

We just received an email about Clever Hippo. They claim to be a search engine for apps and widgets.

From their email:

Clever Hippo Application Search is a search engine for applications and widgets across the web. A more robust version of our Facebook search app, the new Clever Hippo searches the thousands of applications and widgets that are available for your favorite social network, mobile device, blog, home page, and desktop. Clever Hippo Application Search helps you find the apps and widgets that you are looking for.

After playing around with it for a few minutes, it does seem interesting. There is a fair amount of apps and widgets already in the search engine and there is a submission process for developers to get their apps/widgets included.

The search results are as expected and they have added a voting system for users to vote for popular apps or widgets.

Clever Hippo themselves have both a Facebook app and a HTML widget.

If you have ever used Facebook’s app search, you know how bad it is, which creates a space for Clever Hippo to fill. However, if Facebook ever fixes their app directory and search it will severely impact Clever Hippo.

Branching out to other platforms and systems is a good move for them, but it will be tough to compete with existing well established widget directories. At this point, it’s still better and easier to go to WidgetBox or Apple for specialized searches, among others. However, there is space for a cross platform app and widget specific search engine. So, if they do it right, it could still pay off.

For now, Clever Hippo is pretty basic. For us, its real benefit is that it is a replacement for the broken Facebook app search. We will have to see how they develop and grow the search engine to fill the app/widget search space while there’s little competition.

If anyone is interested in Joost Developer Days, check below for some information from the Joost Community Manager.

Unfortunately, there’s no date scheduled for Los Angeles so we won’t be attending.

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We’re delighted to invite you to Joost’s first developer days, a chance for you to meet some of our developers, get some tips for building widgets for the http://www.joost.com platform and share your own experiences in building them.

Who:
These workshops are aimed at developers with at least basic knowledge of html and javascript

What:

• a (free) lunch
• short presentations from the widgets team at Joost, including an introduction to building widgets, and an update on widget features in new releases
• a preview of our first commercial widget
• the opportunity to work on a widget or two yourself or use the workshops to get hands-on help for widgets you’ve started to develop
• we’ll finish up with a drink or two and some free stuff to take away

Where and when:

• initially in three locations: London, Amsterdam and New York
• London (Covent Garden) - 1pm - 6pm - Friday 16th November
• Amsterdam (Central location) - 1pm - 6pm - Saturday 1st December
• New York (Financial District) - 12pm - 5pm - Friday 7th December

We expect places to fill quickly so please RSVP (to dev-workshop@joost.com ) as soon as possible, and let us know which Developer Day you would like to attend and whether you would like to bring a friend or colleague. We’ll then send you more details on the location and format of the day. You may have to go on a waiting list, but we’ll let you know if that happens.

Even if you can’t make the above dates or venues, please let us know if you’re interested in coming to a similar event next year and which location would be best for you.

Please note that some of the presentations will be filmed and we’ll be uploading them onto a special Developer Channel in Joost later in the year.