Bebo widgets made easy
Social networking site, Bebo, has added widgets to its repertoire of music, photo and video-sharing features for profile pages. The Bebo Widgets, so far, are mainly different types of slide shows from Bebo photos, or photos you upload for free from one of three photo-sharing sites: Photobucket, Rockyou and Slide. Once you have created a slide show on one of the sites, it generates an HTML tag that can be cut and pasted. Bebo allows you to paste the slide show as a widget into a Bebo profile page.
Music, graphics and auto-update features can be incorporated into the widgets, and users can choose to share the widgets displayed on their profile page with others. Public widgets seen on any Bebo page can also be added to one's own page in two clicks. The new feature is secure, according to Bebo, because it allows widgets from an approved list of providers that have a relationship with Bebo. The widgets are also hosted separately from each Beboer's homepage URL.
In addition to slide shows, users can create playful customized photos with stylized text. RockYou allows the creation of FunNotes, graphics that will incorporate any text you type into a photo. CNET News.com, for example, can appear drawn in the sand, as a tattoo on a woman's back, or on the spine of an old book. While the text is not entirely realistic, creation is quick and easy.
In a software-driven world, it's easy to forget about the nuts and bolts. Whether it's cars, robots, personal gadgetry or industrial machines, Candace Lombardi examines the moving parts that keep our world rotating. A journalist who divides her time between the United States and the United Kingdom, Lombardi has written about technology for the sites of The New York Times, CNET, USA Today, MSN, ZDNet, Silicon.com, and GameSpot. E-mail her at candacelombardi@gmail.com. She is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not a current employee of CNET. 
