E-Commerce Blog

If you told Rhett Frandsen 10 years ago he’d end up being a professional widget-maker, he probably would have called you crazy. “Back then, widgets were only something you read about in your economics book,” Frandsen laughed. “Until Apple coined the phrase, everybody had sort of agreed upon the fact that it wasn’t anything.” Webster’s still agrees: Look up “widget” and you’ll find “an unnamed article considered for purposes of hypothetical example.” Within the Web-savvy world, of course, the word has taken on new meaning — and that meaning has taken on a large role in Frandsen’s life.

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MediaForge: Finding the Way of the Widget

Last year I wrote about the potential of applications ? or widgets ? on the Facebook platform. At the time Facebook was one of the only social media entities that had an open platform for anyone to build and share applications. Widgets are popular because users can customize their pages to their needs and desires with those widgets. 
Ecommerce sites can use them to brand themselves, drive traffic to their corporate site, and even generate direct sales from the widget. It used to be that a knowledgeable programmer was the most reliable way to go in creating a widget, but secondary services are making it easier to create applications and widgets without deep programming knowledge.


One such company that is getting very good reviews is Sproutbuilder.com. The company allows users to create ?sprouts,? which are multimedia Flash interfaces that can be created without knowing how to program in either Macromedia Flash or HTML. A sprout can be a widget or a full-fledged website,…

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Facebook Widgets: Consider Sproutbuilder.com

Social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook have become extremely fertile environments for product placement and branding. Marketers can reach consumers where they are spending significant amounts of time with compelling content that can potentially break through the marketing noise. Widgets are ideal for social networking venues because they pack a huge impact into a small size, providing a full-featured, sharable experience without the consumer’s having to go outside the social network.

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Widgets and Social Apps: The Rules of Engagement

As social media expands, developers are finding was to monetize it, making it useful for ecommerce. This is done with applications (abbreviated “apps”) and widgets. Jodi McDermott, Director of Product Management for Analytics for Clearspring, a widget developing service, defines the two terms in her blog at Widgetanalytics.wordpress.com. Even though the terms “applications” and “widgets” are often used interchangeably, a widget is a program that can stand alone on any web page as long as a user has an Internet connection and a browser, while an application must be run off another platform, in this case a social media site. A widget can be an app if it is registered as a social app on a social network.

Some social media sites (Facebook for example) allow developers to program their own apps. They can do this on their own or by using development platforms like Clearspring (Clearspring.com). These apps can be customized in many different ways, and there are countless ways to use it…

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Social Commerce For Social Media