Amnesty Hypercube is a small application for Windows XP, Vista, and Mac OS X that will help you pull bits of Web content to use as widgets. These widgets can be brought up or dismissed ad hoc, or added to your desktop as a permanent fixture. Besides its cool name (second only to flux capacitor), the service is not so different from many existing widget platforms, like Yahoo Widgets, OS X's Dashboard, or the Windows Vista sidebar. Yet the company is taking a slightly different approach, one a little closer to Yourminis, which uses Adobe Integrated Runtime to run widgets on your desktop.
The application has a built-in directory of widget sites, which acts as a mini-Web browser to take you to places such as Finetune, last.fm, and eBay's eBay To Go widget maker. Once you've found embed code on a site's original page, copying the code to your clipboard will automatically turn it into a desktop widget. Of course, you could accomplish something similar using Mesa Dynamics' other tool--Amnesty Generator, which will convert all sorts of Web widget code into widget-friendly code for other platforms.
One nice feature on the Mac and Vista version is that you can "push" a Hypercube widget to OS X's dashboard or the Vista sidebar with two clicks. Also neat is its multiwidget desktop functionality (hence the cube name), which lets you organize your widgets on several virtual desktops. You can add more widgets and switch between them from the drop-down menu that installs itself on your system toolbar. It's a little bit like the upcoming Spaces feature in OS X Leopard, but not nearly as flashy.
The only real snag I ran into using the application was surfing through the widget directory. Since it's a miniaturized browser, pages are often cropped below their native size, unless you are using a wide-screen display or are running your computer at a high resolution. This means there's a lot more scrolling both up and down, as well as side to side, if you're on a laptop or small screen. I'd also like to see the service add a right-click contextual menu to let you create a widget from any embed code you run into while browsing on your regular browser. Currently, you have to copy and paste code into a preferences box on the application.
Mesa Dynamics is planning to add a few more features to the beta release, including sharable cubes (similar to the publicly shared page directories on single-page aggregators), cube customizations such as backgrounds and color schemes, and a tool to push a widget collection to Apple's iPhone.
Grab widgets from all over the Web and put them on your desktop. If you're a Mac or Vista user, you can also push widgets to Dashboard or the sidebar to use the native widget tools.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Today eBay launched a standalone Facebook app to let users browse eBay and show off their auctions to friends on the social network. This is hot on the heels of their slick "eBay to Go" Flash widget that made its migration to the Facebook apps platform late last month.
The new app lets you link up your eBay account to your Facebook profile and share items you've put up for auction with your friends, along with making your eBay watch list public to friends who are using the app. The integrated eBay search will pull up identical results to what you'd find when searching through eBay's basic search tool, although it's noticeably missing some of the nicer, advanced power user tools like being able to browse up to 200 listings at a time, and limit results by seller reputation.
Once you've found something that piques your interest, you can add it to your watch list (which cross-posts to your profile's mini-news feed), or share it via Facebook's two-pronged share tool. You can also click the "buy" link which will shoot you off to the item's auction page on eBay.
That's the entirety of the app, but let's take a minute to look at what's missing compared to Facebook's own Marketplace app and buying and selling infrastructure that already exists. The best way to do this is with a chart:
The bottom line is that this new app is a decent way to show off your eBay items, but not nearly as good looking or simple as the eBay to Go widget from a month ago. Sure it's more social than the widget, but it's not nearly as user friendly as the pre-existing marketplace service. If I were eBay, I'd be focusing on ways to create auction listings from within Facebook, along with ways to port over your current Facebook Marketplace listings.
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