While I tend to disagree with most assessments that installing blogs, forums and other PHP scripts is a hard task, JS-Kit takes even the small hurdle away with their widgets.
JS-Kit offers simple comments, ratings and other widgets
JS-Kit, which lets people with basic HTML skills add interactive features to their websites, has raised $1.2 million from The Entrepreneurs Fund III.
It is the latest investment in a widget company, and comes at a time when the major widget makers, RockYou and Slide, are trying to figure out how to monetize their vast audiences.
JS-Kit’s main selling point is its simplicity. By cutting and pasting a few lines of HTML, anyone can add a comment board, polls, or a ratings system to a website. This is notable because the technical skills and cost required to add something like a ratings system can be bothersome and expensive for the small publishers that constitute the bulk of JS-Kit’s network of 5,000 sites.
So Apple is getting on the widget bandwagon with 3 new ‘gits that show various useless things about your horrid music taste.
The more important issue here to me is whether or not “widgets” are truly the beginning (and defining tech) of “Web 3.0″.
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I thought pause was needed to allow you to absorb what I just said.
I know it sounds a little crazy, but widgets are absolutely everywhere now, with even the Web 1.0 “Portal” pages making a comeback (iGoogle) re-powered by widgets and social news (if the latest Netscape rumor is to be believed).
A surprisingly open move for a company that’s normally closed: Apple has just launched My iTunes, a series of embeddable widgets to post your iTunes purchases, iTunes reviews and iTunes favorites to your blog or profile page. The drawback: the widgets don’t actually play any music, they simply list artists and songs with links back to iTunes.
The purchases widget displays the videos, TV shows and movies you’ve purchased from iTunes, while the reviews widget shows the media you’ve given a 4 or 5-star rating to. The favorites widget, meanwhile, displays the artists you’ve purchased most. There are 5 color schemes - all of them shades of blue or black - and you need to click Enable My iTunes in your iTunes Store to start producing the RSS feeds required for My iTunes to work.
