On the heels of the still-unconfirmed deal to buy Photobucket, Fox Interactive Media’s MySpace is apparently making another widget move–acquiring slide show widget maker Flecktor for  as much as $20 million, according to Techcrunch, although FIM has declined to confirm or deny the deal.
Michael Arrington neatly lays out the logic of the deal:
It’s an odd […]

Several pieces this morning got me thinking about the size and scale of the widget business. First, Matt Marshall at Venture Beat wrote about Slide–maker of a web slide show widget:

Slide, the maker of a Web slide show feature, has emerged as a major player, boasting 150 million daily slide show views and more than […]

When is a widget not a widget? That’s the question I find myself asking this morning as I read about Mpire’s official roll out today of 80 new widgets that variously package affiliate shopping and selling data from Amazon and eBay.
Writes Mpire CEO Matt Hulett:
Mpire’s collection of 75 widgets gives free access to packaged, historical […]

Bits and pieces this morning from around the world of social media.
First, in the wake of the mysterious end to the MySpace/Photobucket war, comes an interesting quick piece by one of my favorite bloggers, Andrew Chen, entrepreneur in residence at Mohr Davidow Ventures, on the subject of monetizing widgets. Widgets=ad networks, Andrew argues. And that […]

Reports coming in from the National Association of Broadcasters offer an interesting look at the evolving relationship between traditional media and DIY media. On the one hand you had David K. Rehr, CEO and President of the NAB, kicking off the conference by suggesting that broadcasters are being challenged by the Internet not because anything […]

Yesterday’s MySpace/Photobucket flap was the latest skirmish in the ongoing war on widgets led by Fox Interactive Media, the News Corp division responsible for running MySpace.
It’s funny watching the digerati contort itself in an effort to explain why MySpace is wrong both morally and financially. Jon Fortt at Business 2.0’s The Utility Belt, probably went […]

This isn’t going to help Photobucket with its efforts to sell the company. Late last night MySpace moved to block its members from posting links to videos hosted on Photobucket.
Photobucket had been trying to expand it’s business from photo hosting to video hosting by offering users a suite of editing and production tools to spur […]

Bits and pieces this morning from the world of social media….At Mashable Pete Cashmore tells us about the launch of Spinlets, a service that offers an API to allow users to widgetize social websites. The service is the first product from a company called urSpin. Cashmore cites a number of already launched or soon to launch […]

Let’s assume that the future of social media is all about widgets and places where people can put them. Let’s assume a universe where all media is distributed by users to other users through widgets that stream audio,
video, text, conversations, personal messages, everything.
We already live in a universe in which every Internet user is also […]

The global war on widgets launched by MySpace since its acquisition by News Corp made the New York Times today in a piece about MySpace blocking the Hooka music player a few days it was put to use by MySpace’s most visible user, a singer named Tila Nguyen, whose professional name is Tila Tequila.
Ok, so […]