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.

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 pervaded 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. 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 Web site 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 Web site. 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.

I just came across that an Israeli startup MuseStorm has raised $1 million in a round. MuseStorm, launched in March last year, was a service provider that let developers create the Internet applications in an easy manner without having to learn the APIs. Now MuseStorm is an exciting company that focused on the development of dynamic Web data, such as RSS feeds, Web APIs and widgets. Initially it was launched as a service that provided access to data from Google, del.icio.us, eBay, Amazon, and etc. using the XML technologies. Though they’re now producing widgets for their project so-called, “Widget Central,” I’m quite surprised to know that their background is actually from Mobile related companies and technologies.

MuseStorm raised $1 million from Elron Electronic Industries Ltd., according to this article. In exchange for this round of funding, Elron holds approx. 23% of MuseStorm’s outstanding shares. Notable customers included Globes, an Israeli news provider, and The Washington Post.

I just came across a widget developed by youminis. This is the third project, or widget developed by this media company. It is known as a better version of “Digg This” widget that is a real time and Flash embed that display the number of diggs and comments as well. When you click on the ‘copy me’ Flash button, you’ll see the ‘copy embed code’ that this ‘Digg This’ widget’s codes are available for the public release.

The creation of widgets seem to be the routine work of most technology firms nowadays. However, I just wonder this type of products really fill the gaps in the market and would successfully meet the bloggers’ expectations.