Widgets and desktop enhancements

While the battle to access your music and video files on the go continues both of the software front with services like Qloud, Orb and Simplify Media, there's also the hardware side of things with placeshifting technology from Sling Media, SanDisk and others. Ultimately people want a really simple way to enjoy their stuff elsewhere with a soft or Webware experience that's easy to use.

rVibe is an interesting piece of Windows software that opened up its doors to the public last month. It's half jukebox, half social music marketplace that's taken a new approach to music pricing and sharing by giving users a sizable array of songs that can be both streamed and downloaded using two different price points. While the music comes from a combination of sources, the actual transfer of the songs is handled via p2p in a similar fashion to Napster in the days or yore.

Streaming a song will cost you $.03 a pop, while downloading an entire copy (sans-DRM and at a audiophile-friendly 320 kbps) runs $.99. RVibe has a built-in recommendation service that lets you suggest a track you've purchased to one of your friends. If they end up buying it, you get $.05 back, which can either be spent on more music or donated to charity. It's also worth noting that every time you pay for a streamed song, it will reduce the price of purchasing the track by subtracting the price of a streaming session, all the way down to $.78 a track (or seven streamed plays). While there's a preview portion of the service called "auditions" I wouldn't mind seeing a super low cost streaming option in other popular online music stores to avoid purchasing songs with deceptively good preview clips.

Today they're launching "rVibe Anywhere" which is their personal streaming component. Assuming you've got a copy of rVibe running on the machine with your music library, you can get full access to all your tracks, along with the capability to share any purchased songs with others with an embeddable player widget. While the incredibly popular iTunes software from Apple can accomplish similar feats locally (and across the Web by fooling it with plug-ins), rVibe's solution is a little more extensible from the get go when it comes to making music sharing a social experience. Despite Apple launching their own set of Widgets earlier this year, clicking on a song still requires firing up iTunes, which everyone might not have.

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On Wednesday or Thursday, Yahoo is going to revamp its directory of desktop widgets for the Yahoo Widget Engine. This is warm-up for a whole new version of the Engine, Yahoo Widget Engine 4.5, that arrives the week of November 27.

End users won't see much that's new in the engine itself, but they'll see a shift in how it is pitched. The new directory should be easier to navigate and more approachable. Yahoo, instead of trying to sell end-users on the engine and then push the widgets, will instead begin to pitch the utility and … Read more

Social.fm (formerly Mercora) has a new music sharing widget for social networking users that's got a few tricks up its sleeve. For one thing, it'll scour your profile (on the Facebook version) to figure out your musical tastes, and then do its best to serve up a playlist of those same artists, or others that have been clumped in the same playlists by Social.FM's DJs. The great hope is that the player will adapt to your changing tastes.

Like Qloud's solution, which I took a look at earlier this month, the widget goes hand-in-hand with a desktop application that will link up to your library and do the same thing with your entire music collection. The weakness therein is the widget's UI, which borrows from Apple's CoverFlow sans actual player controls save a large stop button. While this works okay for a few songs, like the inherent weakness of CoverFlow as a navigation medium, the system falls apart if you're actually trying to browse a large music collection or use the right side of your brain for finding artists, albums, or genres.

One thing Social.FM does really well (as it should) is serve up good music. There are some high-quality tracks on here, and a lot of it is surprisingly not just run-of-the-mill studio cuts, but radio appearances or professionally recorded live performances. One of my big beefs with Qloud was that the entirety of the content was coming from YouTube, and there was no way to really dig in to try to get better versions of a song. Facebook users get the added benefit of being able to share their listening habits with others, as listening to a track will publish to your mini feed, and music your friends are listening to will show up in the main news feed if they've got the app installed.

Social.FM is serving up two versions of the widget, one that's a Facebook app, and another that you can plug into any social networking service or site that can handle Adobe Flash embeds, like MySpace, Friendster, and Xanga. You can also stick it on your blog or Web site, which I've done after the break. The company tells me they're working on integrating better with Google's OpenSocial initiative to make their non-Facebook version a little more robust. They're also working on adding a recommendation feature that will let you share a song you're listening to with any user, similar to what some of the other Facebook music apps have done.

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Just over a month after releasing Widgetbox's App Accelerator, a shortcut for turning blogs and other Widgetbox widgets into Facebook apps (review), Widgetbox announced an upgrade that enmeshes its apps more completely into Facebook profiles.

According to Widgetbox, creating a functional Flash widget that lives in and operates from the user's profile page was the top developer request. It was mine, too. I wrote that:

"Most Facebook applications launch in a separate window when you click them, taking interaction off the user's profile page (the Facebook-developed Wall is a notable exception). It is therefore tragironic that … Read more

If you've been a smartphone user running Windows Mobile and looking to play around with GetMobio's "lifestyle portal" for various Web 2.0 widgets, there's a new version made just for you. Windows Mobile users can grab it at http://www.GetMobio.com/nowwm, which will direct you towards a small download.

Both versions offer the same selection of the dozen built-in widgets, the most notable ones being a cheap gas finder, a lightweight and good looking version of Twitter, and an integrated RSS reader that remembers all your feeds. We did a hands-on with the service … Read more

AOL may have been one of the first mainstream services to really make its way onto most consumer telephones (with AIM), but the rest of its mobile services haven't exactly been keeping pace with Google and Yahoo's efforts. Today they're trying to change that with several mobile incarnations of AOL services that have been custom tailored for entry level handsets and smart phones running Windows Mobile.

For users with phones that aren't running a "smart" operating system there are two services that have been specially tailored for you. The first is a new WAP … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--One area where Sun Microsystems' Java caught on was in mobile phones, but a leader of the project is working to eventually replace the mobile-specific version of the software.

Java Standard Edition (SE), geared for desktop computers, will gradually supplant Java Micro Edition (ME) as technology improvements let more computing power be packed into smaller devices, said James Gosling, the Sun vice president often called the father of Java.

"We're trying to converge everything to the Java SE specification. Cell phones and TV set-top boxes are growing up," Gosling said at a Java media event here … Read more

The Facebook chat panel at the Web 2.0 Summit this morning was a time to talk about the Facebook platform and how it's changed the development and monetization of Web services. Several of the panel speakers have immensely popular apps on Facebook, and widgets for MySpace including Slide, RockYou, and iLike.

The two big question pitched to the devs were how Facebook has changed what they've done internally and what's on the horizon. "We looked at the Facebook platform and thought this could be the greatest paradigm in technology since the Internet itself," said Ali Partovi, the CEO of iLike. Partovi and company are one of the real success stories of the Facebook platform, and are currently up to over 700,000 daily active users with their iLike music-sharing application. Partovi also noted that when they launched their app the first weekend of the Facebook apps platform launch, the company had to rent a truck trailer full of servers to handle the traffic.

Partovi also said that iLike is currently pooling close to 100 percent of its resources on the Facebook app, and is actually launching new features first on the Facebook platform before it happens on iLike.com. Other developers on the panel said that their development focus for Facebook apps fell somewhere between 80 percent and 90 percent. Slide was the only one of the bunch that noted it's only spending 10 percent of the time working on Facebook in lieu of working on offerings for other social networking services like Bebo, MySpace, etc.

Also mentioned was the article by Kara Swisher of the Wall Street Journal's All Things Digital earlier this month that lambasted the Facebook app platform as being aimed at "toddlers." Lance Tokuda CEO and co-founder of RockYou said, "She's not a teenage girl...we're targeting the MySpace market...one day I'm going to build something just for her." A statement that eventually led to a chat about some of the more inane apps on the Facebook platform, and how involved users are wiling to let themselves get, both with time and money. One app in particular even lets people spend $10 of virtual currency to throw virtual feces at one of their Facebook friends (or enemies). ILike's Partovi links the "infancy" of these apps because of the age of the platform, and what developers have had the time to build. He also noted that apps for Windows weren't that great either when the operating system first launched.

So what has made this platform so successful?… Read more

While the WebClips function of Leopard is a handy way to turn various bits of Web content into insta-widgets, there's a more exciting feature in Apple's new operating system that I'm looking forward to: a desktop version of Wikipedia.

It comes in the form of an added resource for the Dictionary app--Apple's in-house solution for word lookup. In Leopard you'll be able to look up a word in Wikipedia without actually visiting the site, or relying on the awesome Wikipedia Dashboard widget. Even better, using the on-the-fly lookup shortcut that was introduced in the … Read more