The MySpace Application beta gallery was actually went live on this 13th of March. As of today, there are 250 apps available for the MySpace users to install onto their own profiles, home pages or canvas pages. As I said in my previous post on MySpace Developer Platform, the launched of this platform that enables a range of social software solutions will make their technology appreciably more easy.

In a post published by the team of MySpace Developer Platform, there are apps waiting to be approved, and some of them are rejected. However, since this new platform has been key to MySpace’s new marketing positioning, it still immature to talk about how it will progress on its way to challenge Facebook Platform, while it is still establish itself as an alternative to a social platform for the Web developers.

A look at the most installs on the MySpace Application gallery will attempt to tell us which type of applications will likely to be accepted by the MySpace users.

An Israeli startup Gigya that best known as a provider that help advertisers boost the widget distribution as well as get online tracking has raised $9.5 million in a round B financing. This round of financing was led by Mayfield Fund, alongside with two existing investors, Benchmark Capital and First Round Capital. To date, Gigya’s wildfire technology, i.e. a technology that help advertisers to install the widgets in an easy way onto their blogs or Websites has an installation record of thousands per day, with the capabilities to track more than three billion widget impressions per month for its clients, that include Kimberly-Clark, MTV, Levis, Sprint and Toyota. In addition, an user can easily embed a Gigya widget to a succinct list of sites such as TypePad, Blogger, MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, Orkut, just to name a few.

Gigya said it will use the fund raised to continue its expansion plans, particularly to improve its wildfire technology, pay-per-install widget distribution network, as well as research and development of the products in the lab.

Currently, Gigya has signed more than 500 partners, including seven of the top 10 widget makers, such as the famous RockYou. However, its core business is not to help companies make widgets, but help corporate clients like Toyota, Sprint and MTV spread the widgets across the Web and track their performance.

via [VentureBeat]

Widget is not a strange thing anymore, users nowadays are increasingly using widgets to make their Websites or computing devices more attractive. On the other hand, the existence of widgets enable the organization to generate sales and marketing leads. Today, comScore, a market intelligence firm is launching its innovative eStat widget. This type of widget will allow user to get a grasp of what is going on in the market, for instance the number of users who searched for a celebrity, politician, or a popular figure. Instead of going to search for the latest data, download this widget let you an easy access to the latest data that retrieved from the comScore’s database everyday.

Currently, comScore eStat widget is free and available for Yahoo! Widgets, Windows Vista and Apple.

If you want me to pick the hottest news in February other than the Yahoo! bid, I would agreed that it was MySpace Developer Platform and its social platform war. MySpace, as the top social networking site, has widely reported that lagged behind in building a truly social platform, whareas Facebook, Bebo, LinkedIn, Orkut, Friendster have all expanded to this social platform territories. It is common sense to assume that MySpace did not started its serious incursion into this territory because of the second-mover strategy. They have reported more than 200 million user accounts, without being the early leader in the social platform arena, they still owned the largest number of users throughout the world. However, the launched of a platform that enables a range of social software solutions will make their technology appreciably more easy.

On 5 February 2008, MySpace announced the MySpace Developer Platform and released application programming interface (API), it became a huge opportunity for Web 2.0 startups to build applications based on MySpace API and from there, directly engage with the MySpace’s 200 million users. Currently, MySpace Developer Platform is in sandbox phase, that mean documentation, capabilities, and end-user features are slowly adding to their developer site. Meanwhile, MySpace users would only allowed to access all the applications on MySpace Application Gallery in early next month. Given the brand name of MySpace, Slide, the world’s largest personal media company, has announced that it will launch several new applications, including Slide FunWall and Slide SuperPoke on MySpace.

via [CNET]

Now Friendster directory has a new widget that allowed Friendster users to access their profiles on mobile phones. This mobile widget is known as FriendsterToGo, a newly launched widget that dubbed as Friendster “Go Mobile” application, and it is the first mobile application that designed exclusively using the Friendster Developer program.

This widget is created with the purpose of bringing the Friendster users, amounted to 56 million a totally different social experience. By adding this widget to their profiles, Friendster users can conduct their Friendster activities on their mobile phones, such as update their status, see the latest status of their friends, share photos, view other users’ profiles, and many more. However, the only requirement for them is the login to this FriendsterToGo mobile site with their Friendster email addresses and passwords.

FriendsterToGo was created by guideCast, a mobile brand agency that based in Toronto, Canada.

Last month, I did posted a post on the Friendster’s developer program, and now the Friendster widget directory is available for its users to integrate to their profiles. I can’t tell how easy the widget could be embedded onto the profile since I do not own a Friendster account. However, the widget concept has recently been understood that its presence is “good for the users.”

As of present, there are eight (8) widget categories for one to chose from, namely Slideshows & Photos, Just For Fun, Entertainment, Games, News & Information, Sports, Video and Music. Each category has listed the widgets for users to add onto their profiles, and the widget selected will then apply to a hidden box underneath the “More About User.” Currently, companies that developed the widgets are Slide, RockYou, Jangl, imeem, and etc. Though the Friendster widget directory hasn’t been officially announced, but there are few Friendster rabid users have embedded Slide’s Slide Shows onto their profiles.

Would the presence of widgets be most valuable as part of a larger social networking site? However, in my own viewpoint, there wasn’t a perceived need for such the widgets by the South-East Asian people, because it was unlikely that the users would customized their own profile and try to make their profiles stand out from that of others. Most of my male friends that owned Friendster accounts are those who want to look for friends online from there, or spend time in browsing other girls’ profile pages. Unfortunately, I am not this type of people, and I can’t imagine myself login to my Friendster’s profile once in every day and do these, and basically these are the reasons that stopping me from opening a Friendster account.

I just came across a news that mentioned Sunnyvale-based Minekey has raised $3 million in a round A financing that led by NEA IndoUS Ventures. Minekey is a startup that founded in year 2005 and have offices in Santa Clara and Bangalore. They have a simple goal in mind, to solve the information overload an average Internet user face today. However, the widget Minekey that target contents/news to Internet users’ interests is by tracking the users’ click stream data. Normally, the technology for tracking click stream data began with cookies. Minekey collected the visit information through all these click stream data and then analyzed those data in order that they know what contents should have delivered.

Minekey was founded by Delip Andra as a project incubated at IIT Kharagpur, India’s leading technology institute. Previously, it received a seed funding amounted to $600k also from the venture capitalist NEA IndoUS Ventures.

PopShops is a new widget and store building service that is newly released in the market. As the service is optimized for bloggers that want to find new ways to monetize their site, we can expect PopShops widgets will be pervasive on the blogs that the bloggers want to make some pretty good money in cover the costs of server fee. If you are one of the regular readers at TagEdge, you’ll noticed that I’m a fan of widget, and I did some reviews on some of the widgets available on the Web, but I’m not intend to make money out of using any type of widgets temporarily. However, the available of this type of widgets really forcing me or other bloggers to think of their traditional ways of earning revenues, i.e. AdSense and Amazon in an entirely new way, and different channel. Of course, there is no answer as to which systems, the AdSense, Amazon, or the affiliate produces the highest income for the bloggers.

Apparently, PopShops is sounds attractive to the bloggers or Website holders in the sense that they have more than 17 million of affiliate catalogs, as reported on their landing page. Easy installation, i.e. 3 steps (pick, click, pop). Easy to use, just copy and paste the code into a blog or Website. Plug-in are available for TypePad and Blogger accounts at the time of writing. The beautiful part is the Affiliates keep 100% of their commissions: basic service is free and then there are two additional subscription levels. PopShops is currently associated with some other well-known affiliate advertisement networks such as Commission Junction, LinkShare, and ShareASale, but I wonder whether they will build their own affiliate network in the near future. But my sense is that, in spite of the huge number of widgets available on the Web, this startup has done the ordinary affiliate system in a totally different way.

PopShops is built on the Ruby on Rails platform and it leverages the latest AJAX technologies with a major focus on usability. Competitors in this field include Tumri, Teracent and Wize Typepad Widget.

Update July 31, 2007: PopShops has over 20 million of affiliate products.