WoW Sig Widget: New Artwork

The WoW Character Signature Widget has been updated with some truly exceptional custom artwork. The art was actually done by my Sister. Thanks sis for such a great job! Very nice.

If you are interested in contacting her to get some art done for whatever, you can contact me through this blog or via my email that is listed on the mmogwidgets web site.

Important: if you already have a subscription to the signature widget (through widgetbox) you may need to log in to widgetbox and edit your subscription and update the size dimensions for the widget. You will want to set them to 425 width x 240 height.

It would be nice if Widgetbox would update all subscriptions of the widget when I modify the widgets default width and height.

Penny Arcade in Wired

There's a great article on Wired about my heroes from Penny Arcade. Those two have the coolest life ever.

And they've got some hilarious comics linked with a "reference decoder" and a "jargon translator" to help those non-geeks figure out what the comics are about. Not that we want you in on our little secret world.

Oh, and a slideshow preview of their upcoming game "Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness: Episode I"

100 Subscriptions

I'm over the 100 subscription mark for my World of Warcraft Character Signature Widget. 140 at the time of this writing, to be exact. I know it's not a lot yet, but honestly I'm flattered that that many people like it.

On to 1000!

Immaculate Recreation

I'm a big Rams fan...and Isaac Bruce is probably my favorite Ram. Here's a great video of some guy playing against the Rams in Madden (I think) and the immaculate reception is recreated.

Widgetbox Wish List

Widgetbox recently sent me an email asking for a wish list of sorts. So here goes:

1. Publication of widgets in the galleries of the various homepage sites like iGoogle, Netvibes, etc. Right now they give you the ability to place the widget on your homepage of those sites but they don't (AFAIK) offer the ability to make it discoverable in those galleries.
2. "In-Widget" customization. Let users customize and place the widget all from within the widget itself. Having to click through to the Widgetbox page probably discourages some users from completing the "conversion" process.

Thats all I can think of right now, I'm tired. I was up all last night trying to figure out how to get Facelets portlets working in Pluto. :(

Widget Platform Saturation?

Over the last couple days I've just come to realize how many widget hosting & analytics companies there are right now. You've heard me mention a few of them that I've been working with recently, Widgetbox and Clearspring. Today I found yourminis, yesterday I found Springwidgets. Thats four services that all claim to do pretty much the same thing. I'm left wondering if there's room for all these in the widget space or if there's going to be a shake out and some will either be consumed or just fade away.

I read an article today on the blog by Don Dodge, Director of Business Development for Microsoft's Emerging Business Team. He talks about the Remora Business Model, that he describes as these widgets riding the wave of popularity of MySpace, Facebook, etc. Well, thats exactly what I want to do, but the difficulty comes in figuring out how to monetize that.

Some hosts are buying up their "symbiots". MySpace bought Photobucket for $250,000,000 and MyBlogLog was bought by Yahoo for $10,000,000. Thats a lot of zeros for a widget. Someone thinks these widgets are worth it. I'll tell you this much, if a host offers me $10 mil you can be sure I'm taking it :p

I'm not sure why he thinks that widgets have no value. As a widget developer I spend lots of my time creating services that add value to a users experience on any given page. If it's something that plays well with other widgets and services out there, all of a sudden you've got a new and different ability that maybe didn't exist before.

The real question is, how much value? Charging a small fee to the user to subscribe to your widget might not be out of the question, if the price is right.

Clearspring apologizes

I received a no excuses apology today from Hooman Radfar, CEO of Clearspring. Apparently they had a mix-up in their forum monitoring procedures that caused the delays in my feedback and troubleshooting.

While it doesn't help me resolve the bug, that still persists, it is nice to get an apology for the slow responses. Clearspring seems genuinely interested in working with even their smallest developers (that would be people like me).

Anyway, thanks Hooman. I'm still trying to work out the issue with your developers on the forum, even if I have my widget hosted elsewhere.