Over the last few months I’ve been seeing more and more widgets in the wild. You can check out my sidebar to see some of my favorites. My most recent edition was one from Gene at AffiliateBrand. It is helping me learn what my most popular posts/pages are. Oddly enough, my About Me page seems to be performing quite well. Apparently all of you are wondering who the heck I am! Perhaps I should monetize it 😉
Some of the others I have listed are still performing quite well. I am in love with the MyBlogLog widget, though I think I am about to reconfigure it to make it smaller. As well, I’m going to put the MyBlogLog Stats on my page to try them out. I’ve heard great things (and it looks cool, which is always a good thing when it comes to pleasing bloggers). Gravatar had this area all sewn up and has somehow lost it to MyBlogLog. That’s always interesting to watch.
The Jaxtr one looks cool, but I’m not yet getting a lot of use out of it. I got one call from a man in Italy, but due to the language barrier, the call only lasted about 30 seconds. I’m hoping that as more and more people add it, I’ll see it used more. The Twitter widget should be smaller, but you don’t have that option when you add it. I really would like to add you to my Twitter if you are on the service. I use it quite a bit, and I keep an open tab most days following the conversation there.
Two that are not making the grade are the Meebo widget and the survey widget. I’m not seeing value from them, even though they are certainly built well. I have to make room for a few more widgets, and when I asked ‘what have you done for me lately?’, their stammering reply was not good enough.
And, speaking of widgets, any of you who build web apps, especially those of you who are interested in location and context awareness, contact me via email. I have something you might like. Got a widget you want me to look at? I’m a widget freak, so feel free to email it to me or leave it in the comments.