Today Google launched the Google AJAX Feed API, an API that allows users to develop mashups using only a few lines of JavaScript rather than dealing with complex server-side proxies.
The sample below uses the AJAX Feed API to display a rotating collection of iTunes RSS Feeds.
Pageflakes is an Ajax-based start page similar to My Yahoo!, Google Personalized Homepage, and Microsoft Live. The site is organized into tabs, each tab containing user-selected modules called Flakes containing information such as RSS/Atom feeds, Calendar, Notes, Web search, weather forecast, del.icio.us bookmarks, flickr photos and user-created modules.
Got Widgets?
Now you can make any Flake a widget. Pageflakes provides a code snippet so you can add the Flake to your webpage, blog, MySpace profile etc.
WidSets is a free phone manufacturer-independent Internet service that multicasts preferred feeds and user-generated content to mobile devices. With it you can get mobile widgets, which are much like web widgets, or gadgets, with traffic alerts, news, blogs, gossip, restaurant reviews, weather reports and loads of other stuff that you would normally get through a web service.
WidSets was born out of Nokia Emerging Business Unit and represents a first step in Nokia’s vision of mobilizing the Internet. The WidSets service currently has several hundred thousand registered users and a comprehensive library of over 1200 widgets. WidSets works on a wide variety of mobile phone brands and is compatible on over 200 mobile devices.
If you can’t find exactly what you’re looking for they have templates for creating your own widgets. In the Beta stage, you can tweak the look of your widgets, name them, and set their RSS feed address.
Widgets are usually small client-side applications for displaying and updating remote data, packaged in a way to allow a single download and installation on a client machine. The widget may execute outside of the typical web browser interface. Examples include clocks, stock tickers, news casters, games and weather forecasters. The W3C has begun a mandate to standardize the packaging format, the manifest file and interfaces for working with widgets.
Check it out here: W3C Working Draft: Widgets 1.0
An early pioneer in interactive media, Dean Whitney is a Web 2.0 and Social media technology evangelist. Start-up veteran, President of Garfield Group Interactive a Boston-based digital agency.
