AOL announced on Monday that it has purchased Goowy Media, a company that has created technology for widget creation and analytics reporting. AOL has been partnering with Goowy since early in 2007; financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
To consumers, Goowy is best-known as the parent company of Yourminis, a widget creation and discovery engine.
But the Time Warner unit's aim with Goowy is more likely on the advertising front. AOL recently relocated its headquarters from Virginia to New York to bolster its Madison Avenue street cred; the former online-service powerhouse has been attempting to reshape itself as a digital-media company with profits stemming primarily from advertising, not subscription revenues.
AOL stated in a press release on Monday that Goowy's technology will be used in part for widget-based advertising, providing both more interactive content and detailed statistics on where and how the widgets are being used.
Google is renaming its personal home page iGoogle tonight. Google is also adding a new tool called Gadget Maker that helps people create their own widgets for use on their iGoogle page. The Gadget Maker comes with seven templates, including two media gadgets to pull in content from YouTube and online and offline photo collections. Users will also be able to organize their personal space with a countdown timer and a simple 10 item to-do list. There's also a free-form widget that lets a user mix together various media such as text and pictures.
This is a step in the right direction for Google's personalized home page efforts, although not nearly as fast as some of its competitors in the single page aggregation space. Netvibes has recently come out with branded content pages, and Yourminis has taken the widgets off the browser and onto the desktop using Apollo. I'm still not a big fan of Google's layout, which feels a little boxy and restrictive, but the new themes have spiced things up.
The new features are set to launch at 9 p.m. PST tonight.
Google's new make-your-own-gadget selection features seven new gadgets that can be customized by the user.
(Credit: Google)
Several exhibitors at next week's Web 2.0 Expo are recreating the desktop workspace experience by using new Web technologies such as Ajax and Adobe Flex. This isn't a new idea, but what is interesting is how many of them have forgone creating their own tools and stuck to integrating existing Web services in a stylized portal platform.
Zcubes attempts to emulate a desktop workspace with nearly 30 different tools that mimic desktop applications. With most of the tools relegated to things like casual drawing, comic strips, and Web browsing, the emphasis of the suite is fun.
G.ho.st (Global Hosted Operating SysTem) calls itself a "virtual computer," which for the most part is true. The service borrows some style cues from Windows XP and has floating widgets like what you'd find on YourMinis. It uses Pandora as a music jukebox, and Meebo as an IM client. G.ho.st users also get 3 GB of free online storage, which can be used for saving things while away from a home PC.
Sparc integrates Thinkfree Office, 50 GB of online storage, instant messaging, voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), and a DVD conversion tool. Sparc is a little different from the other two apps, as it requires a small, self-running Java download to get going. We're interested to see the pricing and partnerships with this one, as 50GB of Web storage isn't something that's being handed out for free these days.
See also: Peepel, YouOs, Xcerion.
Related: Web OS: coming to a desktop near you
YourMinis, the popular single page aggregator service, has launched desktop integration with its library of over 14 million widgets, using Adobe's Apollo technology. After installing the Apollo runtime and the YourMinis Apollo plug-in on your PC or Mac, you can simply click on any widget in the YourMinis library and click "Add to Desktop." Likewise, there's the option to send any widget to the Web if you'd prefer it to stay on one of your YourMinis pages. It's really well-done.
Once they're on your desktop, you can drag them around, change colors, transparency levels, and various settings for each widget--the usual features that come with a full-fledged widget application.
Mac users likely will be uninterested with the new feature, as they've already got a built-in widget engine with OS X's Dashboard. PC users, on the other hand, now have another free way to put widgets on their desktop besides Yahoo Widgets and Google Desktop. As we've mentioned before, Apollo is still pretty early on in development, and the YourMinis widgets are RAM-hungry. With just four open, they were taking up more CPU cycles and memory than Microsoft Word and Outlook combined. It will be interesting to see how Adobe addresses this problem further along in Apollo's development.
See also News.com's take on how Apollo is 'one-upping' Ajax.
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CNET Networks)
We covered Twitter in early January, and since then it's gotten a lot of buzz (especially at SXSW this week.) As cool as it is, there are several ways to improve the experience. You can make viewing posts faster, read "tweets" through RSS, and more. Check out these Twitter accessories:
Mac widget Twitterific
(Credit: The Iconfactory)1. Twitter apps and widgets: Get Twitter out of your Web browser and onto your desktop. For Windows users we recommend Twitteroo, a simple and small desktop app that's good for monitoring and posting to your twitter feed. Vista users also can try Twadget, which runs in the gadget sidebar. For the Mac, there's Twitterific, which advanced users will like for its hot key support, allowing for quick scrolling and sorting through feeds using keyboard shortcuts.
If you want to dig deeper into Twitter apps, try the Twitter Fan Wiki.
2. Twitter via WAP: Twitter was built for SMS, but some phones have rotten SMS clients and many users have to pay for SMS messages. An alternative is Twapper (review), a Web page that displays Twitter messages in a very phone-friendly format. It doesn't let you post messages, though.
3. Mapping services: GeoTwitter shows the latest public Twitter posts on a large Google map. You can click any of the pins to read the post. Twitterami takes a different approach, using location announcement service Frappr to show where Twitter users reside and linking to their feeds.
A Flash Twitter badge
(Credit: CNET Networks)4. Twitter badges: Put badges on your blog or social networking profile to show off your Twitter feed. Twitter gives you three flavors to choose from, including a friends' timeline that shows the last five posts from your Twitter friends. Instead of visiting your page on Twitter, they'll be able to see it on your site.
5. Blogging: Besides putting the badges on your site, there's not really a way to publish through typical blogs yet, which is where Alex King's Wordpress plug-in comes in handy. If you've got a Wordpress blog, you can simply install this plug-in and publish right to your Twitter feed without having to visit Twitter's site. There also are options to archive and grab Twitter updates to copy straight into a new blog post.
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CNET Networks)
6. RSS: Avoid Twitter's site completely by adding your friends' Twitter RSS feeds to your favorite reader. In fact, if you're using a single page aggregator such as Netvibes or Pageflakes, you can set up your own tab for just Twitter feeds. There's even a Twitter module that lets you post straight right from your Netvibes page. You can find a person's RSS feed at the bottom left of their Twitter page. If you're using Firefox, clicking on the RSS icon on the address bar will give you the option to subscribe. For IE7, just click the orange RSS button under the refresh button.
One thing none of these apps will do: improve Twitter's overall reliability. The service grew so fast last week that it is now regularly overloading the Twitter servers. The team is working on reinforcing the platform.
Rafe Needleman contributed to this post.
Single page aggregators, also known as personalized home pages, can be a helpful way to keep tabs on your favorite Web content without having to visit each site. With nearly all of them able to display content from popular Web sites, choosing one comes down personal taste. We've run down some of the most popular aggregators, citing what works and what doesn't.
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CNET Networks)
My.Netscape relaunched today, providing users with an Ajax-driven drag-and-drop interface to add and customize newsfeeds. There are about a hundred premade feeds to choose from. If you want to add a site that's not on there, you can plug in the site's RSS feed. See also Google Personalized Home Page and My Yahoo, which offer nearly identical functionality.
What works: No ads, quick loading content modules, simple to use.
What doesn't: A limited selection of add-ons, lack of visual customization.
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CNET Networks)
YourMinis is a page aggregator that feels a little bit like Mac OS X's Dashboard with tons of customizable widgets that are both beautiful and useful. YourMinis lets you create several different pages full of content, which can be navigated using tabs or by viewing each page in a live thumbnail preview. You can also share your customized page with other people, who can then rank and comment on it. Previous coverage here.
What works: Gorgeous design, easy to use, tons of widgets to choose from.
What doesn't: The pretty widgets can't be popped out on the desktop.
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CNET Networks)
Netvibes is the most popular single page aggregator. With its popularity comes easy availability of modules for any site you're likely to be looking for. Like YourMinis, the look of your Netvibes page can be fully customized, even down to how wide you want each column of modules to be.
What works: A large catalog of sites to choose from, simple and slick design.
What doesn't: Sometimes slow to load.
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CNET Networks)
Pageflakes provides similar functionality to Netvibes and YourMinis, but places more emphasis on community-created pages. These are pages with preset modules that can be added as new tabs on your Pageflakes interface. They provide similar utility to what you would get using meta-aggregator sites like Original Signal and Popurls. Watch our interview with Pageflakes CEO Dan Cohen here.
What works: Fast-loading and dead simple to use.
What doesn't: Some of the community content could be sorted better. Foreign language items are mixed, and there's not a way to browse by genre, which can lead to confusion.
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