Gigya, the leading widget and social technologies company, today announced that it has added a new feature to its Wildfire technology, giving end-users the option of sharing widgets with selected contacts imported from major webmail providers including Gm

It’s been quite a busy week for widget companies. RockYou kicked things off by announcing its $35 million Series C round on Monday. KickApps and Clearspring partnered to bolster their respective widget efforts on Tuesday. And now Widgetbucks is announcing

Yahoo Japan has clearly taken the whole widget concept to heart in introducing a new service that helps users get the most out of digital TV broadcasts [Japanese].

The announcement on metrics for developers also came with news for users: soon users will be able to “sample” applications before adding them and letting these applications access their information. To keep an application, users will have to reconfirm

Facebook has made a number of changes to the behind-the-scenes workings of its developer platform, according to a blog post Monday by engineer Pete Bratach. For the most part, the updates are geared toward two things: letting users keep tabs on spammy app

Buzznet, the social network whose CEO told CNET News.com in April that he’d like to build “the next Viacom,” has launched a sister site: Celebuzz, a community for enthusiasts of celebrity news and gossip. It’s been in private beta for some time now.

At the recent InterPlay Conference devoted to social gaming in San Francisco, Charles Yong and Jing Chen from social networking metrics platform Developer Analytics addressed the engagement for social games since Facebook launched as a platform. In partic

Let’s say you’re a big Facebook user. One day you get an e-mail from your company. It invites you to an in-house social network, a Facebook for just you and your colleagues. Do you sign up? What about if you learn your boss is on the site? Do you “friend”

Unlike political candidates, Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and other online ad providers can receive an unlimited amount of campaign cash. While they won’t receive the kind of ad money that TV and radio will attract in this election season, Sen. Barack Obama is v

The Facebook mini-feed continued its expansion on Friday, adding YouTube, StumbleUpon, Hulu, Pandora, Last.fm, Google Reader, and your personal blog to the list of sites that can share data to Facebook. The import feature already included Flickr, Picasa,

Check your Facebook inbox. Say “Hi” to friends. Learn about a lockdown on campus. Facebook, the wildly popular social networking site, has already established itself as the unofficial source of campus chatter, whether it’s to announce a wild party, a prot

During the past year as I became consumed by Facebook, Facebook has become my portal for business communication. An increasing number of my business conversations have been taking place inside of Facebook. A cornerstone of this strategy has been my abilit

-FriendFeed has largely replaced my use of Google Reader.
-FriendFeed has essentially replaced my use of Twitter.
-FriendFeed has definitely replaced my use of Facebook.
-FriendFeed is fast.
-FriendFeed has search (also fast).
-FriendFeed isn’

Casual games are making connections with social networks to make a play for even bigger audiences. The reach of online casual games is already impressive: One-third of people ages 6 to 44 have played them, according to market tracker The NPD Group. Global

unlike Google, which has focused on an almost exclusively developer-centric message to buffer their lack of clarity around user privacy, Facebook has revealed its conflicts of intention between serving its advertisers while awkwardly protecting the intere

Whether you are a world traveler or just take local jaunts, TripTouch does the location research for you. TripTouch delivers links to places to eat, local events, hotels/motels, transportation and more. Local images are included in the widget as well.

The few thousand of you that installed idiomag’s Facebook app will have noticed that over the last few months it has experienced problems as the number of users have grown. So, we have rebuilt our embedded magazine, and it is now available as a widget o

Back in 2006, when I was 24, my life was cozy and safe. I had just been promoted to associate editor at the publishing house where I’d been working since I graduated from college, and I was living with my boyfriend, Henry, and two cats in a grubby but s

I was interviewed last week for an article on BusinessWeek.com, Facebook’s New Facelift. If you didn’t already know, Facebook is in the final stages of a redesign process. BW asked a few designers for their views. I had a few thoughts: First, Facebook

School staff should trawl social networking sites such as Facebook and Bebo to identify whether their pupils are gang members, according to advice in a government report. Children, even those from primary schools, are being sucked into violent gangs, says

Facebook is giving users plenty of time to adjust to an upcoming redesign. The company unveiled plans yesterday for a new tab-based design yesterday, which is essentially a way of keeping profile pages “simpler” and “cleaner” — or less MySpaceyish

When you’re one of the earliest adopters of a new technology, or one of the first companies into a new space, you tend to be very bullish on its future. That energy was very much in evidence Thursday at InterPlay, the first-ever conference solely devoted