Last week Hart Woolery a lead developer at YourMinis created a new mashup using Snap Shots & Digg’s new API and submitted it to Digg API Visualization Contest.
Jason who works with me at Snap posted the story on the Snap blog and in a few days his story reached Digg’s home page.
This a very cool mashup and great product recognition for the Snap Shots product.
Just came accorss this mashup on John Montgomery’s blog. We have seen similar mashups created using Google Maps but this one demonstrates some of Popfly capabilities. I wish there were settings to define initial load state (location, timeframe of twitter messeages etc). But this is very cool.
Update: I had to remove the mashup from this post since it prevented the side bar from loading. If you are interested to see it, visit John’s blog.
I read some of the coverage around the blogesphere about Popfly, Microsoft latest innovation, and I am anxious to get the invitation email and start playing with it.
I felt the same when Yahoo Pipes came out but after playing with it for a while my enthusiasm ended since the capabilities were very limited and allowed creation of a limited types of mashups.
Popfly might turn to be different and big. Here’s why?
- The design tool looks amazing
- It could span a large social network for mashupers
- A site hosted on a .ms tld – not something you’d expect from “Microsoft”…
- Ducks
Here’s one example of a mashup created using Popfly.
BTW, you need to install Silverlight before accessing the page.
Lijit is a a blog search engine that uses people, content and connections to influence on relevance of results.
They used data their spiders collect when visited over 8000 blogs to analyze the Widgetsphere and released thier findings a few days ago.
Below are a few highlights:
- Snap is leading the Search category with almost 50%! The Snap Shotsstrategy pays off (Bloggers get free utility that enhances their site’s user experience, Users get a tool that saves them time while surfing the web, Snap gets search traffic and brand exposure).
- Beyond Snap, bloggers also love Google Analytics & even more they love Google Adsense (I am sure Google also loves the data collected from blogs in order to optimize the Adsense algos). One question that I ask myself is what do bloggers do based on their site analytics findings? Are they using the two services in conjunction? How many apply site optimization techniques and change the design in order to improve Google Adsense CTR? How many change their writing style to make thier posts shorter in order to keep information above the fold (when people read in detailed post mode, not just excerpts)?
- Although it is considered one of the most popular Web2.0 web sites, Digg badgets are available on only 1.5% of the blogs. I assume most of Digg’s traffic comes from other sources of information such as stories on large publications
- Twitteris in a similar position – lots of noise but only on about 2.5% of the blogs. On the other hand they are the 3rd leading content widget (after MyBlogLog and Flickr).
- 14 companies operate in the analytics category. Many are free of charge and not a clear plan for monetization. I am sure there will be some consolidation soon.
- I was a bit surprised to see meebome only at the 48th position. It might be related to the demographic of the sample site.
Last crazy idea – As this industry grows, and more and more companies enter the Widget space (check out the latest from Ebay), a financial institutation should create a Widget Companies/Categories ETF. This would be a nice interaction between the financial world & the blogesphere, and potentially another way to make money out of blogs.
