Two different widgets featuring content from the NCAA Men’s Hoops tourney. Both cool and both useful, but significantly different in their designs.
This one is from Clearspring Technologies. Gives me access to lots of content and I LOVE their “GRAB IT” feature. Makes it very easy.
We’ve learned a lot about widgets from Clearspring, who helped us launch our first Colts widget a couple of months ago. So far our little widget has been place on over 3,000 web pages earned 950,000 views. What’s really cool is it is living on and maintaining viewership even though our season is long since over and we really haven’t updated the content (since it’s an action photo widget). We’re working with Clearspring on our next one now. More on that soon.
Anyway, here’s a look at the “views” chart over the past 2 months. This is from Clearspring’s useful tracking and reporting service.
This second widget is from Springwidgets
I really like this one too, but it’s a very different execution from Clearnspring’s. This one tends to keep you interacting with the widget itself rather than sending you to Web pages for more detail. I found this very cool and very convenient.
In fact, I found it last night as I was watching the Indiana Gonzaga game and noticed that the score of the game shown on the game was keeping pace pretty well with real time. Not that I’m gonna sit and watch a widget all night, but it’s nice to know that data can be pushed to widgets that fast. I like the way you can move around the brackets and search for the team you want find. Well done!
It’s great to see companies experimenting with widgets. Seeing these examples helps me think of ways we can apply this technology to add value to our fans’ online experiences.
I’d love to hear suggestions from readers…what else could we do with widgets? Which of these exectutions do you like better??
Hi Pat
Maybe clearspring knows better - but does the size of the widget matter in its proliferation?
I would think something(especially in sports) that can fit in the nav of your typical sports blog would gain greater acceptence and be more useful.
See the nba scored widget on this page(way down on left)
http://celticsblog.com/
These larger ones will work for a blog post or too , but will be pushed to the next page as soon as a few new entries are made.
just a thought
Widgets should be designed so the end site can customize the height and width. We use a free RSS widget on the teams MySpace page and it allowed us to make these adjustments. Assuming one size fits all limits the usage.
The more options and ability to customize and size the widget will definitely help adoption and usage. Not everyone wants to dedicate that much space to a widget. However, blogs and sidebars are not the only place where people would use them. Large sized widgets do have their place.
There’s always a balance between the size of the widget and the information being delivered.
As for which of the two I like better, I like both. They serve different purposes and provide different information. That being said, if you put the Fox bracket system into the Clearspring “Brackets” tab and make it the default view, then you got the perfect March Madness widget.