Tingz offers up cross-platform widgets that share data

Tingz is a new widget engine whose big feature is cross platform data sharing. At the TechCrunch50 conference it was shown off on a Mac, iPhone and Windows Media Center PC, with various widgets pulling together the same data set.

The example given was a recipe widget on your computer that tells you how to make something, and if you don't have one of the ingredients you can bookmark it. This information gets ported over to a shopping list widget, which you can then access on-the-go via the iPhone application.

Presumably users would have it installed on both platforms to make the most use of it. When added on your desktop computer it adds contextual options on a system level so you can clip text, links, or other items and send them to your widget sandbox. Like Shifd, a cross-platform notes tool I use, this is handy way to port it around.

The Windows Media Center app might have been the most out of place, as it was advertised as being large and eye friendly but the text still looked incredibly small. It runs as an application within Media Center, which could make it useful for getting some Web video widgets to run right on your TV.

There are already a ton of services that have this cross platform data sharing, and panelist Digg.com's Kevin Rose pointed out these tools are invariably at odds with the built-in widget platforms found on OS X and Windows Vista. The one thing I think it has going for it is the built-in payment platform where you give Tingz your credit card credentials and and developers can let you pay for services via their widgets. This was shown off for something like buying movie tickets.

The service is currently in private beta and requires a software installation on all three platforms.