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GoFish just morphed to betawave. Links in the twitterfountain below:

So according to AdAge, Matt Freeman is moving to GoFish. Good news, indeed!

I was surprised to learn that he also plays a rippin' bass solo:

Let's hear it for Matt Freeman!

Just caught an interesting panel discussion on 'widgets and gadgets' at AdTech. Jeremiah Owyang moderated the panel, here are a few comments.

Jeremiah Owyang from Forrester Research

• On the Facebook platform: fish where the fish are
• But not all widgets are successful!
• How many Facebook widgets have business utility?

Hooman Radfar from Clearspring:

• Need to understand that widgets have different uses:
  • Public vs. Private consumption
  • Browser vs. Desktop
  • Social vs. Not
• This (widgets) is a platform
• Success metrics are tricky to identify. Treat it as a web channel.
• Cross platform compatibility and measurement is tricky (e.g. Netvibes had no uptake/usage data until recently)
• Challenge: it's a new medium. Old approaches don't always apply.

Kent Schoen from Facebook:

• "we call these applications"
• open up the field to allow other folks to design/deliver engaging interaction
• what do you want to get out of your application?
• Yes, the net is bigger than your site. Get your brand out there.
• Success depends on how you define it: reach, interactivity, installs, active users on some regular interval.
• Examples: Trip Advisor's map.. NYTimes quiz. Branded show & tell about the user.
• Success is: something that provides value.

Jane Felice from ComScore

• reach matters, we measure reach
• measurement is still evolving
  • some function of repeat people over some number of days viewed
  • started with tracking SWF (flash) files, moved toward Facebook, just starting to measure javascript.
• we can report on views, can't report on perceived value.
• FREE: tag your widget in a certain way and we'll report on it.

Ed Davis from ESPN

• 'the internet is our playground'
• widgets are inventory
• It only works if people like what you're doing. You need to see the viral usage which happens when simple useful things are found valuable.
• low barrier to entry: try things out!
• Monetize: drive awareness for other ESPN offers
• SEO lift is another amazing benefit from a rich widget offering
• For us, more frequent data updates (scores) helped drive the uptake of our widgets
• Uptake is like an impulse-purchase

Folks agree that valuable widgets tended to be successful, but couldn't really describe anything specific about what tends to constitute value. Seems also like these folks are struggling to define ways to measure the elusive 'engagement' metric that folks have been writing about recently.

So if you happen to find something in your access_log that mentions GFSearcher, it's me. Apologies if this is a nuisance. I'm running some tests with Nutch on a small number of sites for my day job.

GFSearcher/GFSearch-0.9

I'll follow up this post with some info about how everything works out.

I love to browse off-the-shelf tools and doodads floating around the net. Recently I was looking for a widget to publish our corporate news titles on the gofish.com homepage. Sure, I'd love have time to write this from scratch, I don't... but I have about enough time to try 5 and see what works the best.

Quick summary of the features I'd like to shoot for:

• MUST: browser compatible
• MUST: pull corp feed
• MUST: be easy to implement
• SHOULD: customize colors
• SHOULD: customize dimensions
• SHOULD: be quick to load (<3secs)
• SHOULD: not give up too much info to a 3rd party
• SHOULD: serve it in a 300x250 RECT size.(why not?)
  • 305x215 Whole corner
  • 305x40 The heading
  • 305x175 List area
• NICE: pull & mix several feeds
• NICE: sort multiple feeds
• NICE: Re-syndicate the widget

Our Raw Feed
Looks like I can grab a feed of each category. This might make for some handy intermingling of headlines. The downside is that it looks like I'm pulling a whole-article feed. I'll see if I can get this to just pull the titles. I'll set up a feedburner feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/GoFishCorp before using one of these doodads.

Yourminis

www.yourminis.com seems like a neat platform for building and syndicating a flash widget. They allegedly have some relationship with brightcove, I'll see if there's anything worth exploring there.

WidgetBox widget
This looks like a javascript/xhtml implementation. Kinda nice, but let me check it out in a pile of browsers first. Seems like the widgetbox is chock full of other presentations. Would be nice to find one that can handle a few feeds at once.

Some javascript doodad
It's a freebie, kinda simple: http://itde.vccs.edu/rss2js/build.php. Kinda simple, but it looks like I can style the output pretty easly.

Another javascript doodad

Nice javascript-only implementation, doesn't seem like it's working though.

Feed Sweep
Feedsweep is free for noncommercial use, handles a bunch of feeds at once, and is super-simple to put together. Creates a nice dhtml presentation of the title list. I think this

rss-to-javascript
Another freebie, not sure I can get this into the dimensions of the content area on the homepage.

What do you like? The other folks on the team here seem to like the yourminis the best. I'll put a POC together soon.