Spring Widgets

Lot’s of discussion about widgets these days. Brad Stone’s piece in the NY Times today about MySpace blocking widgets (in which I was quoted) got me thinking about Fox’s own Spring Widgets platform.

Spring Widgets are like many of the widget development platforms out there. You create your widget in the Spring Widgets service and you can run it "anywhere". Or at least that’s the value proposition that Spring Widgets and the other widget platforms present. Brad’s piece suggests that you can’t run many of them in MySpace right now.

Funny enough, I’ve been told that MySpace is currently blocking Spring Widgets [correction – MySpace is not blocking Spring Widgets but the outbound links in the widget are broken]. Maybe Spring Widgets, Fox’ own widget platform, isn’t yet in compliance with the MySpace terms of service. Or maybe there is another reason. I honestly have no clue.

I do like the way the Spring Widgets have integrated FeedBurner’s feed management service into their platform, as Pete at Mashable explained in this post.

I’ve been pretty vocal about the need for widget platforms to support feeds. I don’t want to have to publish to my widget. I want my feed to be that interface. Write once, read everywhere. That’s how the web should work, widgets included. So I like that Spring Widgets supports that notion.

Now we gotta figure out why MySpace is blocking them isn’t doing more to promote Spring Widgets.