yourminis

AOL gets widgety with Goowy acquisition

AOL announced on Monday that it has purchased Goowy Media, a company that has created technology for widget creation and analytics reporting. AOL has been partnering with Goowy since early in 2007; financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

To consumers, Goowy is best-known as the parent company of Yourminis, a widget creation and discovery engine.

But the Time Warner unit's aim with Goowy is more likely on the advertising front. AOL recently relocated its headquarters from Virginia to New York to bolster its Madison Avenue street cred; the former online-service powerhouse has been attempting to reshape itself … Read more

Yourminis

Category: Browsing

Yourminis gives you a page that you can modify with your own mix of widgets--RSS feeds, Flickr images, video feeds, weather and time blocks, and so on. The widgets and the Yourminis container page are all in Flash, and the widgets are very pretty to look at and easy to move around on the page. You can also do things with them--such as rotate them arbitrarily, for a scrapbook effect--that you can't do on Ajax start pages.

Yourminis recently rolled out a technology using Adobe's Apollo framework that lets users take the widgets out of their … Read more

Google re-branding personal home page, adding widget maker

Google is renaming its personal home page iGoogle tonight. Google is also adding a new tool called Gadget Maker that helps people create their own widgets for use on their iGoogle page. The Gadget Maker comes with seven templates, including two media gadgets to pull in content from YouTube and online and offline photo collections. Users will also be able to organize their personal space with a countdown timer and a simple 10 item to-do list. There's also a free-form widget that lets a user mix together various media such as text and pictures.

This is a step in … Read more

Virtual desktop trifecta at Web 2.0 Expo

Several exhibitors at next week's Web 2.0 Expo are recreating the desktop workspace experience by using new Web technologies such as Ajax and Adobe Flex. This isn't a new idea, but what is interesting is how many of them have forgone creating their own tools and stuck to integrating existing Web services in a stylized portal platform.

Zcubes attempts to emulate a desktop workspace with nearly 30 different tools that mimic desktop applications. With most of the tools relegated to things like casual drawing, comic strips, and Web browsing, the emphasis of the suite is fun.

G.ho.st (… Read more

YourMinis puts widgets on the desktop via Apollo

YourMinis, the popular single page aggregator service, has launched desktop integration with its library of over 14 million widgets, using Adobe's Apollo technology. After installing the Apollo runtime and the YourMinis Apollo plug-in on your PC or Mac, you can simply click on any widget in the YourMinis library and click "Add to Desktop." Likewise, there's the option to send any widget to the Web if you'd prefer it to stay on one of your YourMinis pages. It's really well-done.

Once they're on your desktop, you can drag them around, change colors, transparency … Read more

Six ways to improve Twitter

We covered Twitter in early January, and since then it's gotten a lot of buzz (especially at SXSW this week.) As cool as it is, there are several ways to improve the experience. You can make viewing posts faster, read "tweets" through RSS, and more. Check out these Twitter accessories:

1. Twitter apps and widgets: Get Twitter out of your Web browser and onto your desktop. For Windows users we recommend Twitteroo, a simple and small desktop app that's good for monitoring and posting to your twitter feed. Vista users also can try Twadget, which runs … Read more

Roundup: single page aggregators

Single page aggregators, also known as personalized home pages, can be a helpful way to keep tabs on your favorite Web content without having to visit each site. With nearly all of them able to display content from popular Web sites, choosing one comes down personal taste. We've run down some of the most popular aggregators, citing what works and what doesn't.

My.Netscape relaunched today, providing users with an Ajax-driven drag-and-drop interface to add and customize newsfeeds. There are about a hundred premade feeds to choose from. If you want to add a site that's not … Read more