Getting a widget onto a website, whether its a blog or a MySpace page or anything else, is a bit of a pain. Users generally have to copy an embed code, log into their website, and paste it into the appropriate place. While that hasn’t proven to be an insurmountable obstacle, widget startups that have found ways to make it easier for users to add widgets to their sites have seen significantly higher growth rates v. their competitors.

Slide, RockYou and Photobucket were early experimenters in this space. Instead of forcing users to do the cut and paste, they simply asked them to input their MySpace (or other social network) credentials and then put the widget onto the site directly, on their behalf. When they first started doing this in 2006 everyone expected MySpace to cut them off for security reasons, but that never happened. MySpace let the companies log in as users and publish the widgets. Slide, RockYou and Photobucket saw growth explode. Competitor FilmLoop, who chose not to offer this feature, stagnated and is now in the DeadPool.

But offering this feature is a bit of a hassle. There are a number of large social networks to deal with, and they occasionally change their APIs or login procedures. When that happens, the feature breaks until changes are made. So most widget companies today simply stick to the tried and true “cut and paste” approach to widget proliferation.

Enter Gigya, an Israeli startup that launched a tool in November 2006 that allows people to email widgets to others instead of just posting them on websites. Their initial product is doing well, they say. And now they are launching a new product called Wildfire that will allow widget producers to directly embed their widgets into the bigger social networks (MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, Hi5, Xanga, Blogger and Tagworld are currently supported). There is a do-it-yourself option for small widget startups, and they are working directly with some of the larger ones.

Once Wildfire is implemented with a partner widget site, users simply select the social network they use, type in their credentials and the area of the site they want it to appear, and hit submit. The widget will then be placed on their MySpace or other social network page. I’ve embedded a very high level overview video of the service below.

Snapvine and Bolt/GoFish have already integrated Wildfire into their sites. A number of other widget startups will be launching with Wildfire in the next week.

Gigya isn’t charging partners for the service, saying they have plans for expansion into mobile and other areas where they can begin to generate revenue. Co-founder and CMO Rooly Eliezerov says they want Gigya to be a platform for widgets, and their first two products (Gigya and Wildfire) are just the beginning.

The company has done a lot without spending much money to date. They’ve raised just $600,000 in a single financing round from Benchmark Capital and First Round Capital in November 2006. Even though the round was small, those are tier-one investors who must see a good long term business plan.

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Product Reviews are pure gold - people want to see what others say about a product before buying (Forrester Research says 71% of online shoppers seek out product reviews). If you control the reviews, you have a very qualified lead that you can then try to sell something to, or pass off to someone else for a fee.

Today, product reviews are largely concentrated at big hubs like Amazon, CNET Reviews and Epinons (owned by eBay). But lots of startups are trying to innovate and get a piece of this market, too. We’ve written about Wize, which scrapes and analyzes reviews from sites around the web (mostly Amazon and epinions), turning mostly unstructured content into a 1-100 score. We’ve also looked at many others, including Retrevo, Viewscore, Shopwiki, Metacritic and Kulist in a comparison post. All have good features, but it’s hard to stand out from the pack and get enough traction to lead the space.

PowerReviews is taking a different approach. There are many retailers that just don’t have the resources to build Amazon-like product review features into their websites. PowerReviews gives these merchants the ability to add reviews to their sites, and they don’t charge anything for it. Another startup we’ve covered, Bazaarvoice, also provides retailers with review software, although Bazaarvoice pricing starts at about $2,000 per month for smaller sites. Since PowerReviews is free, they have a big edge.

To date, 120 merchants are using the PowerReveiws software. 140,000 or so reviews have been created for 45,000 unique products.

PowerReviews is willing to give away their software to merchants, but in return PowerReviews have the right to aggregate that review data and present it on their own consumer facing review site, Buzzillions.

Here’s the brilliance of the PowerReviews model. They then turn around and sell traffic from Buzzillions right back to their merchant network, on a CPC or CPA basis.

I don’t believe I’ve come across a startup before now that manages to use data, created at a partner site, to generate traffic that they then sell right back to the partner.

PowerReviews isn’t stopping there. They are offering content sites a white label version of Buzzillions in exchange for a revenue share. Their hope is that these white label sites will generate enough traffic to supply PowerReviews with a business model.

There is more to PowerReviews than an elegant business model. Their reviews are highly structured and based on 8,000 unique product templates. When users write reviews they are asked to supply answers based largely on tags, and PowerReviews suggests tags that previous users have chosen. When a new users is looking for product research, they are asked a to click on tags that describe what they are looking for. PowerReviews is then able to recommend a few products out of a category that might suit them best. It works surprisingly well - to try it, go to the digital camera page on Buzzillions and answer some of the questions in the green box center top.

Of all the new product review startups mentioned in the second paragraph above, Buzzillions seems to have found the most unique business model. Whether it will be successful or not is yet to be seen, but we’ll be checking in with them periodically for updates.

The company raised $6.2 million from Menlo Ventures and Draper Richards in December 2005.

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Microsoft announced this evening that they will be integrating Live Messenger into the Xbox platform on May 7, linking 260 million Live Messenger users with 6 million Xbox Live users. Xbox Live users will be able to chat with up to six contacts simultaneously by plugging a USB keyboard into the Xbox. Gamers will love this. The video below shows some of the new features (taken from Kotaku).

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Yahoo has just announced a cool new wifi device, called the SanDisk Sansa Connect, that comes ready to listen to Yahoo Music (see Yahoo Music overview here along with competitors) and it also syncs up with your Flickr account.

This gives them something to promote as Apple spreads its iPod empire and Microsoft markets its Zune music (and soon, phone) device.

The Sansa Connect is $250 and comes with 4 GB of memory and a (small) 2.2 inch screen.

If you are a subscription music fan and willing to pay $15 or so per month indefinitely for access to a large library of songs, this may be a device you’ll want to have. Certainly having access to Yahoo’s entire music collection of 1 million+ songs on a portable device is going to be attractive. But as the DRM walls fall, owning songs outright will be more attractive to many users than the indefinite subscription approach.

Yahoo’s Ian Rogers (listen to my interview with Ian Rogers here) is touting the device and the Yahoo subscription plan v. downloadable music. He does make one off-putting remark at the end of his post when he suggests that iPod users only have pirated music on their iPods:

For those of you about to complain about the $12/month to get unlimited tracks (like, um, Steve Jobs), check yourself before you riggity wreck yourself. Labels and artists get paid for every radio play and every Yahoo! Music download to the Sansa Connect, whereas we all know iPods are mostly full of not-paid-for MP3s. At Yahoo! would like to help maintain a healthy music business, compensating labels and artists at a fair price to consumers. The labels and the consumers have been pretty far apart in this negotiation and we think we’re doing a damn fine job striking a balance between the two with the rich feature set Sansa Connect and reasonable monthly price of Yahoo! Music Unlimited. We hope you think so, too. If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem, right? (emphasis added)

Ian, those songs on iPods are usually (sometimes? often?) from ripped CDs that were purchased (and ripped) quite legally. The artists, and especially the labels, were already paid once for those songs. Just because I want to now listen to them on my iPod doesn’t make me a music stealer. Consumers don’t want to keep paying for the same songs over and over and over again, just to be able to play them on a new device. And they shouldn’t have to, either.

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The popularity of social networks continues to rise, but there are more of them than you can shake a stick at. See, for example, our recent coverage of social networks for families, dog lovers, teens, tweens, and even old fogies.

In a fragmented world, where OpenID is still far from standard with social networking sites (just look at the OpenID directory), there’s definitely room for a third party to fill the gap. Loopster is the newest application, along with Profilactic and ProfileLinker, trying to help people wrangle these disparate networks into an easily consumable, unified format.

Profilactic focuses on aggregating your social network data and creating feeds that are mashups of the different content you and your friends produce (MySpace blogs, Dugg stories, etc.). ProfileLinker focuses on creating a single interface to all of your social networking accounts, notifying you of friend updates, messages, and search all your networks at once. They are continually adding new networks to their collection of 75 so far.

Loopster takes a more basic approach than Profilactic and ProfileLinker, aiming to be a “RSS feed” for your friend’s updates across the multiple networks (although they don’t actually offer a RSS feed yet).

Once you’ve registered with Loopster, you hand over your credentials for MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook, Live Journal, or your Blogger user name and click “Add”. This gets Loopster’s crawlers working. They log in to each of these sites on your behalf and traverse your friend network, grabbing their names, bios, interests, and details (this takes quite a while).

You interact with your friend’s profiles through a main page with a grid of all of your friends from each network. Whenever a friend’s profile is updated, their profile lights up with a “new” icon and a note about what has changed. You can either click through to Loopster’s summarized version of the profile or click directly through to the original source. Since you probably have some overlap between the friends in each of these networks, Loopster also lets you merge together profiles of the same person from different networks. However, the program is still a little buggy and I wound up with multiple copies of the same profile. This was probably due to some impatient clicking of the “add friends” button, which sent multiple crawlers to the same site, grabbing the same info.

The off label methods these sites use to crawl social networks puts them in a somewhat precarious position. MySpace doesn’t have an API for its site, and has been known to send some nasty C&D letters to people who crawl their network. Singlestat.us is one MySpace victim and their competitor DatingAnyone is also dead.

Sites like Loopster are a sign of a mini revolution happening with the social web, where instead of managing and linking documents, we are managing and linking personal identities. Traditional search engines like Yahoo and Google are very poor at discovering and managing this information since social relationships aren’t always hyperlinked. This is the gap that sites like Wink, Streakr, and semantic web startup Metaweb are trying to fill.

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Google threw a new product called Goog-411 into Google Labs today - a free telephone based information service that could replace toll 411 calls. About 2.6 billion 411 calls are made in the U.S. each year, and it is a $7 billion/year market.

Goog-411 can be accessed by dialing 1-800-GOOG-411. The product is completely automated and there is no way to talk to a human for additional or clarifying information. You tell it your city and state, and then ask for a specific business or business category. In my tests the product was excellent. Although the voice recognition was only working at about 70% efficiency, I just said “back” and retried when it didn’t understand what I said. Results are spoken back or text messaged back to you, and you are automatically put through to the phone number requested.

GOOG-411 is using Google’s normal local business information available on Google Maps and elsewhere. Businesses that want to add or correct data can do so here.

The product competes head on with Jingle Networks, which has taken 6% market share in the U.S. 411 business over the last year. AT&T is also experimenting with free 411 calls. None of these products come anywhere close to as good as TellMe’s rich client business information tool for mobile phones, but few phones support TellMe at this time (TellMe was recently acquired by Microsoft).

The paid 411 market is so dead. I’m betting these free alternatives take at least 50% market share within a couple of years.

Update: This is actually a product that Google’s been testing in various formats for some time. Steve Poland (a regular contributor here) is pointing me to some posts (and here) by Greg Sterling from last year that discuss this. The earliest reports on this are from October 2006, and the service may be from an acquisition of 1-877-520-FIND. More information here.

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