The 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver are well underway and it’s been a great games. In fact, the US Olympics Team has been amazing so far. From Shaun White’s double McTwist 1260 on this victory lap to Lindsey Vonn’s first ever USA Gold in the Women’s downhill on a bruised shin to the USA Men’s 5-3 win over Canada in hockey. These are just a few of the highlights as USA currently holds the top spot with 24 overall medals.
We love the Olympics for the sports, competition and spirit of the games. If you can’t get enough of it on TV, here are three widgets to keep you updated online.
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.
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
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.
