StickiWidgets

Lawrence has a great post over at Sexy Widget on “Building a Web Service in a Distributed World.” While he raises more questions than answers, he does provide details and a viewpoint based on his experiences and his company, RateItAll.com. We agree that there isn’t a one size fits all solution and that each company will have to look hard to see what model fits their business.

Here’s a excerpt from the post to wet your appetite.

So what’s the right model? Fully distributed like Zynga or a focus on a core community with only marginal outreach to the SNS like Yelp? And how should you manage your various user bases? Should a user on one SNS be able to interact with a user of another SNS via your app (Zynga)? Or should the user bases be kept separate (iLike and Flixster)? And what should be the ultimate goal of your distributed business? Reach or feature ownership? And what brings a higher chance of success porting an existing web service to the social networks (Flixster), or building something native (Renkoo)?

It’s unlikely that one size will fit all. But I have come to some conclusions in regards to my own company.

It’s called Hub and Spoke.

Head on over to read the entire post.

The widget provides you with a way to let your site/blog visitors review/rate or obtain reviews/ratings from others. On load, the widget provides the visitor with the rating form (stars) and text field for a written review. If the visitor is already a RateItAll member, upon login, the rating and review will be submitted. Otherwise, the visitor can create an account right from within the widget.

Along the bottom of the widget there are a couple of additional features. Clicking the “Community” button will present the list of people who have provided a rating and what their rating was. “Reviews” will display the latest user review and you can page through the available written reviews and ratings.

The widget can be used to rate and review the site it’s on, a topic being discussed or a specific product. In short, anything that can be reviewed.

At any time, visitors can click through the ratings and reviews to the RateItAll site for more information and additional features. As it stands, the widget itself provides most of the RateItAll platform that is immediately relevant to the visitor. This strikes a nice balance of providing the site/blog owner with added value without steering visitors away. All too often we see widgets that add no value and pull visitors away. This is not the case here and on the contrary it may actually drive traffic to your site.

Since the widget is driven by the RateItAll system, all information is pushed back to RateItAll. What this means is that your site/blog will now be exposed to the traffic and users of RateItAll, without any additional work. RateItAll claims they are currently at about 800K monthly uniques. In addition to the features already discussed above, this is a nice added bonus.

If you are interested in beta testing this widget, you can get on the list here.

This post is getting a bit long so we will spare you from the analysis of how this widget benefits RateItAll and its business.

For additional coverage, check out Read/WriteWeb.

Here is the third March Madness widget that we’ve come across. This one is brought to you by RateItAll and MuseStorm.

RateItAll provides the rating and commenting system for all the teams in the Tourney. The resulting feed is fed through MuseStorm and presented in the widget. Each team with its rating and latest comment is displayed and cycled through.

See what others are saying and how your favorite team is rated.

[via Sexy Widget]