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Widget Removal - Which Ones Made The Cut?
Thanks for all the comments/votes on my Widget Removal post.
At 54 comments, it may be the most commented on post in the history of this blog.
As many of you commented, the widgets that run on this blog should be my choice and nobody else's.
I agree, but I also realize that many of them have been running for a while and may have gotten stale.
What I really need to do is put in a widget service that will cache, serve, and rotate all my widgets. I know that Sniperoo does something like that. I am sure there are others. Please leave a comment to this post if you have a service that does this. I may someday get around to implementing that.
But at this point, I am still doing all of this manually. And this morning I manually removed a bunch of widgets and moved some around too.
I am not going to list all the widgets that got cut. I don't want to offend anyone.
I will list the ones that made the cut and why.
First, here is the "off limits" list that I provided in my initial widget removal post.
1) In Heavy Rotation - Sonos sponsors this widget which generates money to charity. It stays.
2) Ads - They aren't technically widgets, but they generate money to charity. They stay.
3)
Portfolio company widgets; Sitepal, Etsy, Indeed, and Delicious (for
old times sake). My portfolio companies are how I make money. They stay.
There were two widgets that are extremely popular and got mentioned by a bunch of commenters.
4) MyBlogLog - my personal favorite widget. Sure wish it was a USV portfolio company but that's a story for another day.
5) Flickr - the audience's favorite. and the grandaddy of widgets. and still one of the best.
And these got enough votes to keep them:
6) Wallstrip - Howard and crew are working on a better Wallstrip widget and it's needed according to some of the comments.
7) The Music Widgets - I kept only last.fm and Streampad. More on this later.
And I kept the House Ads. They are my ads. They stay.
Everything else either became a link or is gone. Honestly I don't notice the difference. The blog page is still butt ugly (or shabby chic depending on your taste). And I don't think it loads any faster.
The only widgets I really miss are the music widgets. But I don't want to have ten music widgets. What I want is one music widget that I can program to go fetch data on the various music services I use and present it in one place. When is someone going to build that?
I hope you all found this useful. I certainly did. There are a few big takeaways for me. First, widgets are loved and hated. Purists like Nick think that they violate the purity of the page. And Nick is clearly not alone in that camp. Others think they provide needed social/emotional/informational context. That's the camp I am in.
Also, there are problems with the way widgets have been implemented to date. We need infrastructure to manage them. That starts with caching, serving, rotating, etc. And I am sure there is a lot more that can and will be done to improve widgets.
But one thing is for sure. Widgets are here to stay. This blog is proof of that. There's no way I would remove all of my widgets. And more are on the way.
Comments (14) | Posted January 22, 2007 in Bling , Venture Capital and Technology
Comments
Fred,
I see *NO* difference in loading times...
I do see that some things are a bit misplaced, like nothing loads under MyStuff and Etsy appears under house Ads.
Perhaps what would also improve the user experience is creative a couple more pages. For example if you create about page, then blogs that you like and personal profile and perhaps a few other things could be moved there.
Your blog has a lot of great posts, so having a separate page for best posts, search and categories could make it easier for people to find this. So you could move that there as well, and that should free up a lot of space.
Alex
Posted by: Alex Iskold | Jan 22, 2007 10:04:33 AM
As I recall, the day you started including the Wallstrip widget was the day the blog slowed down to a crawl. Since that one is being remedied, we'll have an improvement soon.
Posted by: Karen E | Jan 22, 2007 10:47:00 AM
Color me disappointed but not surprised.
As always, though, it's your site, you can do with it as you like etc. and so on and so forth.
Posted by: Brian Donovan | Jan 22, 2007 10:55:24 AM
haters :)
I think a wallstrip badge suffices and I think that would suffice for most bling as long as it conveys the message.
Badges could solve most of the problems.
Posted by: howard lindzon | Jan 22, 2007 2:01:53 PM
Actually, I've never noticed A VC loading slowly - but then I guess I would say that.
It's true, Snipperoo will soon give you a bunch of tools to play around with. Like, random rotate widgets around the sidebars so they don't get stale. Or rotate them in and out, so you see a subset each time you visit. Someone just suggested that we do a 'user choice', so that a visitor can set their own choice of widgets to see. I'm also keen to do rollover drop down menus in the sidebars so things are a bit tidier.
Have to say also, some of the widget writers could be just a little more respectful of the space they are looking to occupy. Look at that Sonos thing - squatting like it has no cares in the world in the sidebar. It could so easily be rewritten to be a tight elegant UI to the content.
Thanks Fred though for paying attention to your widgets.
Posted by: Ivan | Jan 22, 2007 3:10:00 PM
Fred,
As an avid reader and sometimes vocal commenter, I like the changes you have made. The load time is much faster, thereby improving the experience for the reader, and the stuff you are keeping is all stuff that I for one enjoy. Blogs are works in progress, with progress being the key.
Posted by: Stephen L. McKay | Jan 22, 2007 3:20:05 PM
Good post, Fred. As you're probably aware, Widgetbox let's you do this sort of widget management very easily.
Posted by: Ed Anuff | Jan 22, 2007 3:21:28 PM
Ed beat me to it, I was about to mention widgetbox.
I like this look, and now the main page doesn't have sidebars longer than the content.
Posted by: candice | Jan 22, 2007 4:46:00 PM
Fred,
As for the avatar, well I have absolutely nothing against those of the flaming persuasion, and Chelsea is a great place, but I just don’t know if it fits you. Ask the Gotham gal, and your kids about this one.
Posted by: Stephen L. McKay | Jan 23, 2007 12:58:39 AM
I'll miss the Root Worms widget. Only the most adept stalkers realized the power of that one.
Posted by: Andrew Parker | Jan 23, 2007 10:25:40 AM
Shabby chic for sure.
Posted by: Blake P. | Jan 23, 2007 4:15:12 PM
Great feature Fred.. like your take on the widgets. We are obviously still very early on the widgetmania but I think the idea of distributing content this way has some serioyus legs.
But here is a request for you: try Sonific's latest music widgets with The Barenaked Ladies (to get it use the shortcut at www.sonificbnl.com) don't use auto-play but put it in the sidebar, and see how people will take to it. We have some acts that have been played 50k+ times and have found a whole new audience this way so this is definitely a promising new channel for bands (and free;).
Sonific has 10s of 1000s of these SongSpots alive at 50+ sites (see www.sonificmusic.com for some bookmarks) and about 50% of our users actually do use the autoplay option - so the acceptance of this feature seems to grow quickly... will be interesting to see how that shakes out.
I think Music is a very special case as far as widgets goes, btw - a lot more investigating has to be done to solve the related UI issues, imho
Posted by: Gerd Leonhard | Jan 29, 2007 9:31:15 AM
Really worthy info, thanx. I am crazy about music and try to keep up with the latest news:) there exists immense variety of good sites! mp3 music download site is my favourite!
Posted by: sonique | Feb 23, 2007 9:19:19 AM
Hey Guys
Check out sonific.com
They provide free music for blogs, photo-sites and social networks; currently they represent most independent labels and over 150.000 tracks that are available worldwide, for free.
Cheers
Marc
Posted by: marc | Feb 23, 2007 4:05:02 PM
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