Design Essence Creative web design for small businesses.

Okay perhaps that’s a little harsh… or perhaps you’re just scraching your head at this title going “Huh?”

http://www.flickr.com/photos/agentmitten CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Widgets really are everywhere these days and it’s pretty awesome that you can add them wherever you please to enhance another site you already use or even your own website.

On this website I’m pulling in all pings I send out through Ping.fm. Now any pings you send out through Ping.fm gets sent to any status, micro-blog or blog service that you like. For instance, when I do a default ping it posts status updates to these sites for me: Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Mashable, Friendster and Posterous.

Here’s where widgets and status updates get hairy. I found a site called TwitterFeed. Set twitter updates to update Ping. Ping is set to send status updates to all social sites above. This includes Twitter. Oops.

Echo, echo, echo, echo…

All I wanted was anything I post to automatically post to all others.

Social websites and third party software developers are running into similar problems themselves. For instance, they were ready for my blooper and broke the never ending loop I created. Otherwise it would still be posting. Ah!

Mashable wrote an article based on a problem that Twitter ran into when retweeting. If you are Twitter, who’s responsibility is it for managing retweets, the third party software that allows this to happen or Twitter itself? At first Twitter gave this responsibility to third party developers. When they added a retweet capability to Twitter, they changed their mind and took responsibility themselves. This means developers have to update coding in their widgets. Woops on Twitter’s part. Twitter apologized to developers and offered this explanation:

“One of the main confusions and criticisms about the retweet API was around what happens when a given tweet is retweeted multiple times. The explanation was that developers need to do their own retweet collapsing. If N people retweet a given tweet, you’d get N instances of that same tweet in the appropriate retweet timeline and the home timeline. You would then have to do your own internal book keeping about whether that tweet had already come in. If it hadn’t you’d display it for the first time. If it had you’d update the already displayed tweet.

Asking developers to collapse retweets in timelines is onerous, complicated and confusing. We’re not going to do it that way. We are going to add a resource that gives you all retweets for a given tweet. In timelines you will get only the first retweet. You can then request all retweets for that tweet at any time to get up to 100 retweets that have been created for it.”

FYI the new Twitter retweet feature will look like this:

So on all levels this sharing of information back and forth has it’s confusions. And I can only imagine that a third party developer has to create new code for the same widget to go into someone else’s framework. Making a widget for iGoogle? Awesome! Now putting that same widget onto Facebook you’ll probably need to write different code with different handling procedures than iGoogle.

Welcome to the wild west of widgets.

I’m not a developer but with the speed of development in the widget world, especially that of social network widgets, I’m sure there are no standards yet in place.

It’s not all bad news. I’m just mentioning all the complications of sharing information across various platforms. If you can manage to figure out what your goal is, what tools are out there to help you achieve them and what possible problems you’ll run into and how to solve or safe guard against them, widgets are a powerful thing indeed.

I’m still learning about installing widgets myself. I hope in the end that any posts or comments I make are sent to all my platforms automatically. It makes me look like an incredibly active user on all social media sites with a fraction of the work!

Wait till I want to track all my activity and who views what activity on what platform… It never ends!

Originally posted 2009-09-19 17:47:23. Republished by Blog Post Promoter