Last year we here at Go Global Gadget LLC were privileged to create an advertisement for Netflix.
This Adobe Flash Google Gadget Ad was run on many high profile websites from Oct 11th 2007 to Oct 18th 2007 to promote the Netflix Promotion Campaign called Netflix Now Playing Featuring Dana Carvey. We converted the video from High Definition TV mp4 into the exact size seen in the gadget ad. This was to reduce the size (width, height, quality, and file size) of the video for accessibility and thus allow more users to view the ad. We also maintained the 16:9 aspect ratio while having space for all the other elements of ad. There is even a button in the ad for adding the gadget to the users’ homepages. This adds a viral nature to the ad itself.
To help reduce their company overhead we hosted the gadget, the gadget ad, and the video. 4,000,000 ad views were expected over the week.
The Google Gadget Ad platform was utilized to measure the interactions of users and the gadget to test its effectiveness. Also, the Google Proxy Caching was used to reduce bandwidth consumption on the hosting server.
Another of our popular gadgets is the Butterflies gadget. These little Monarch Butterflies fly around your page, even landing on your gadget title bars. (That’s a good place to rest).
The sirgle most popular gadget is our inline gadget: Ladybugs. They crawl around ON your page. They can’t be shown here but you can click on the link and add it to your iGoogle page. As of this writing there are 329,074 users and growing every day. One of the latest features has been the various colors of the ladybugs.
One of the major problems with iGoogle is that these “inline” gadgets aren’t the same priority as the regular gadgets. In fact, these gadgets are about 90% less important than regular gadgets. A great example of how Google downplays these gadgets is by not listing them in their “Most Users” category. It should be on page eight but, alas, it’s not there. Apparently not all gadgets are created equal.
Sellers put the html in their item listing and the buyer click it thus taking them to the Price Tweet page. From there they enter their Twitter username and the trigger price. When the item price passes the specified price it will send a reply tweet directly to your Twitter account. As the end of the auction approaches the website will grab the prices more and more to keep you in the loop.
We believe the problem Google introduced that affected inline gadgets is now fixed. The problem was that all users got the security warning text regardless if they already clicked yes. Many people, apparently, didn’t click anything and left the warning there. The user numbers for our inline gadgets is now back to where it was plus growth. We haven’t verified this happening except in our usage numbers. It took about 7 weeks for them to fix the problem.
We created Universal Search Tabs out of a need for a really cool multi-search tool. Just before Google locked down the ability of gadgets to “inline” (gadgets that work in the page instead of just a box) we created Universal Search Tabs.
This gadget adds various search tools as tabs above your iGoogle search box. There can be icons as well as text and there is a Universal tab that allows you to select which website you’d like the search box to search without configuring the gadget.
We created a new website called Twibler.com. It’s yet another Twitter tool. This website is all about automatically posting your eBay listings to your Twitter account. It’s been in the works for a while now and we finally finished it up last night.
It should be noted that something at iGoogle has probably changed. Starting on Sunday there has been a notable jump in gadget activity. Each day has added 4-6% but yesterday there was a 10% jump in usage over all. We’re not sure what’s going on but we wanted to document this activity.
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