StickiWidgets

We’ve updated the bLaugh widget. A bLaugh! logo was added and the buttons have been colorized to match. The biggest change is the new “Grab it!” feature. This new option allows anyone to easily get this widget onto their own site or profile page. There are currently 11 pre-defined site options (no more hand coding) and email or the embed code. What this means is easy access to blogs, Blogger, social networks, MySpace, Facebook, start pages, Pageflakes, etc.

The widget is also now powered by Clearspring. The “Grab it!” feature is part of the Clearspring platform, in addition to a slew of analytics. We are looking forward to seeing what the Clearspring platform can do and once the system officially launches we’ll provide a review.

Clicking on the logo will take you to bLaugh.com. Both the comic image and title will take you to the comic page. However, all three of these will not work on sites like MySpace where they set allowNetworking=internal. For those sites, you can use the old bLaugh! custom embed code that will work on sites that block external links like MySpace.

Widgify has a couple of posts on start pages becoming widget management systems and allowing export of their widgets outside of their domains. Here are the Widgify posts on Pageflakes and yourminis.

It’s good to see these companies moving in this direction. We took a look at the offerings and noticed one major difference. The Flakes from Pageflakes are exported in HTML code snippets while the minis are Flash widgets. This means that the Flakes will be limited in where they can be used (social networks do not allow this type of code) and the minis can be used just about anywhere (MySpace, Stickam, blogs, etc).

It will be interesting to see where these two companies take this and if other start page companies will follow.

For NBA fans, here is a yourminis scoreboard widget for the NBA. If you don’t like the yourminis widget, there’s always the scoreboard from SpringWidgets.

It’s been a while since we have posted about Pageflakes, an Ajax powered start page. We haven’t had the opportunity to work on additional features for the Stickam Contacts Widget which happens to fit will within a Pageflakes start page, utilizing the web page flake.

Over at TechCrunch, Michael Arrington teases us with information regarding a complete redesign and new features for Pageflakes to be launched in the next couple of days. If this is the case, we may have to revisit the Stickam Contacts widget and see how it fits in with the new Pageflakes design.

Michael mentions the ability to “publish” your page for others to view. Some adjustments will be needed to the contacts widget so that the Stickam contacts list can be viewed by people other than the list creator. However, we are not sure we will make this change or what type of options we will provide. Providing the list to your viewers is one thing but giving them the ability to launch into chat is another. Chances are we will put an option in there to display the list only, without the other features for the list creator.

We will keep an eye on this. In any case, we will/should take a look at the Stickam Contacts widget and see what improvements we can make to it. Feel free to contact us if you have any questions, suggestions or requests.