Ok. So here it is. Live. In person. The first Colts widget ever created for official distribution:
You should be able to “grab” this widget and send it right to your personal profile page inside most social networking systems. Myspace is the one big exception. If you’re using Myspace, you’ll need to copy the code (near the bottome of the widget) and paste it in by hand.
This widget features action photos of Colts players. We’re sending through XML feed the 8 most recent photos from Colts.com, and we’ve programmed it so that it will scrol through a slide show shwoing a mixture of different players.
We’re also sending through XML our top news headlines and our most recent video additions. All the links on this site drive traffic back to colts.com. Aside from giving fans a cool thing to stick on their social network pages, driving traffic to colts.com is our main goal.
Please note, Myspace does not automatically allow links to send traffic away from its pages, but we’re working to fix that right now.
We’re also promoting our Super Bowl tickets contest through this widget.
I explained the Colts “widget” strategy in a previous post. You’ll remember we’re working with Clearspring Technologies on this beta project. Clearspring has a widget syndication system that will allow us to get our widget posted into widget galleries, and track where our widget goes on the Web. If it gets grabbed, posted or forwarded to a friend, we’ll know about it.
For anyone who missed it, Mashable announced the winners of its Social Networking Awards. In the category of widgets and add-ons, here’s what they say:
Mashable Choice: Slide.com
People’s Choice: Zwinky
Hot for 2007: RockYou, Stickam, Snocap, Zingfu, MyBlogLog
View Nominees
Slide.com and RockYou have been the most talked-about widgets this year, with Slide.com gaining a little more traction with the MySpace set. Both are impressive products which give users the freedom to express themselves. Even the launch of MySpace’s own service, MySpace slideshows, didn’t put a dent in the popularity of these two slideshow tools. Zingfu, another one of our favorites this year, has also achieved success by allowing users to create funny images of themselves and their friends. Meanwhile, we think Stickam’s live webcams are a killer idea, and the service will be a big success. We’re also hopeful that MyBlogLog, a service that helps communities to form around blogs, will successfully expand to the mainstream in 2007 - they added support for MySpace only a few weeks ago, and we think that could be crucial.
The popular vote, meanwhile, went to Zwinky. The avatar service has a huge, dedicated user base consisting largely of teens. In our original review, we said that Zwinky “will probably be a massive viral success despite a lack of interest from the geek elite”. We stand by that claim going into 2007.
That’s pretty cool!
[...] [via Pat Coyle] [...]
You’re famous: http://www.widgify.com/?p=39
Is there also going to be an option to make this a desktop widget?
[...] [via Sports Marketing 2.0] [...]
David,
Here’s what Clearspring Technologies is saying about the desktop verion:
“we hope to make our widgets portable across Vista, Google Desktop, and some of the Apple environments in the first quarter. It will take a bit of work on our part for that, but we are almost there. We will keep you posted on that for sure.”
Pat, thanks for answeing that!
David, we are hard at work on different porting strategies now. One thing that we have been testing is popping the widget off a web page into a Vista Sidebar, or Google Desktop as Pat had described.
There is a ton going on in cross-platform widget development, so stay tuned. I hope we can make these things happen for folks like you ASAP.
[...] That has proven to be a good start. We are hard at work with our partners to figure out what else matters. I will keep everyone posted on our findings. I am sure that - in addition to the folks above - widget fiends like Danny, Lawrence, Tim, Ivan, Dare, Rob, Niall, and - of course - ninja widget creators have some ideas. What do YOU think the new metrics for widgets will be? [...]
[...] Hooman Radfar poses this question in response to Keith Teare’s follow-up post on Fred Wilson’s discussion of this “De-portalization” trend: If you buy the atomization of the web bit, then you are probably on board with the concurrent theme being propagated around the blogosphere - the death of the page view. Folks like Evan Williams, Fred Wilson, Steve Rubel, Michael Parekh, Om Malik, and Jeff Jarvis all agree that existing metrics no longer cut it… What metrics will make the cut in this brave new world? … I am sure that - in addition to the folks above - widget fiends like Danny, Lawrence, Tim, Ivan, Dare, Rob [thanks for the shout out, Hooman!], Niall, and - of course - ninja widget creators have some ideas. [...]
[...] Over the holidays, Pat Coyle’s IT marketing team released a new widget for the Indianapolis Colts. Members of MySpace, Facebook and other social software are expected to plant the content on their web pages and spread the word about the team. Not long after launching a promotional contest to win Super Bowl tickets, the Colts started calling it a “photo slideshow” (widget wasn’t easy to understand). Into the first two weeks of the effort, tracking showed over 19,000 views of the campaign and 6,200 new registrants … all of whom completed the 10-question demographic survey. Yesterday — on the eve of the the Colts second-round playoff game — the team followed with a third release, two new social games for the website. [...]