Go Global Gadget ^™

We’ve published a new tool for all you website owners and blog operators.  Tweet Roosters is a little button that enables your users and readers to post to their Twitter account directly from your website or blog.  Why would someone put this tool on their website?  It takes only a little bit of space and opens up in a box directly on your website but primarily it helps your website or blog get more exposure on Twitter.

There is even a WordPress Widget Plugin for Tweet Rooster.

The dot is an index of the Global Consciousness Project. It is the real time analysis of their data. This site downloads their data once a minute and runs sophisticated probability functions to find the coherency the random numbers are that are generated by the project. The theory is that global human thought changes the way the random numbers are generated and thus captures the unity of thought across the world. The new website can be found here at the GCP Dot. Here is the web enabled version of the dot:

This is the iGoogle gadget version and the Apple Dashboard Version:

We created a new flash version of Ladybugs. These stay in a gadget. It’s possible to add this to MySpace or Facebook. (Version 1 Ladybugs are on the whole page and can’t be embedded on other websites.) Here is the gadget:

While there are other Astronomy Picture of the Day gadgets, we thought we could bring something unique to the table: The image that resizes to your gadget. There is no guessing or images that slide out of view with a smaller window.

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).

Add Butterflies to your iGoogle homepage

Once again this is an inline gadget with that has been reduced in importance in the iGoogle gadget directory.

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.

Add Ladybugs to your iGoogle page

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.

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.

Once again thank you Google!

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.

Universal Search Tabs

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.

This is an adaptation of our Apple Dashboard Bedrock Biorhythm gadget. It was done in flash and renders your biorhythm. What’s great about this gadget is it’s interactivity. Click on the graph and move your mouse! You’ll see that you can zoom in and out and move across time with the click of a button.

The Apple Dashboard widget can be found here:

Download Bedrock Biorhythms for Mac

One of our more popular gadgets is the New Music Releases Gadget:

It has tabs so you may select between the various genres.

We here at GGG wanted to create our own Wikipedia gadget. We didn’t want to follow the herd and just re-create what already existed. We used our capabilities to create a dynamic Social Wikipedia Search. This is a fun change that uses the power of community to educate: not just on Wikipedia but within a gadget. You get to see what other people are searching for. It only shows the latest few searches and there is an option to opt out of sending your search to everyone else. If you opt out then your searches will go directly to Wikipedia. You basically get to see what other people are searching for. In this process you may find an entry you’d like to read.

Here it is in action:

Last fall NetLingo and GGG collaborated to create a gadget called NetLingo Word of the Day. It’s a great useful gadget that shows various words and phrases used around the ‘net. There are thousands of entries and we are fortnutate to be working with such a person as Erin on such a website as NetLingo. Our part of this was to actually make the gadget. The easy part

It can be viewed here:

About a month ago, Marth 18th, there was a mistake made in the iGoogle Gadget server software. All of the grandfathered inline gadgets users received the security message again. They have already clicked OK but for many it was confusing and deleted the gadget instead of clicking OK again. People thought it was a virus or malware, or something because the sum of people clicking delete was upwards of 65% of all inline gadget users!!! That’s an enormous number of people. This comes on the heels of Google deprecating the inline gadget modules a few months ago. That was a decision we here at GGG disagree with completely given our orientation towards animal gadgets in the page (Ladybugs, Butterflies, and Real Fish).

Not only did they deprecate inline modules they made them very nearly irrelevant to author standings and searches. This was a real stinker because our highest rated gadget developer dropped from 3rd place to 28th place. But also important was that we thought our Universal Search Tabs were really useful and should have a chance to stand up against the other multi-search gadgets. Due to Google’s negative bias towards inline gadgets we ended up promoting that gadget through our existing gadget base.

Google, if you’re listening, these have been a bad series of decisions. Inline gadgets are one of the few things that made your platform unique among the many gadget platforms. Some day you’ll remove the grandfathered gadgets from operation and that will be a terrible day for the hundreds of thousands of users that love our Gadget Animals.

Our DVD Releases gadgets are extremely popular. It’s about displaying the dvd releases for the week with the ability to search and scan forwards and backwards as many weeks as you’d like. The iGoogle gadget is here:

Our Apple Dashboard DVD Releases Widget can be downloaded as well. It was ported over to the Opera web browser as a widget which can be downloaded here. It looks something like this:

It can also be found on NetVibes. It looks like this:

Lastly, we have a Vista DVD Releases Gadget which can be downloaded here