I have converted my sidebar to being almost 100% widgets from other services. Right now I have widgets from statzen, twitter, MyBlogLog, last.fm, flickr, and plazes. I have to figure out how I want to include a linkblog. I like that ma.gnolia provides screenshots from the sites in my linkblog, but they don’t have a widget that adds that.
Right now the statzen widget is just a rough draft. I am going to be changing it to a tag cloud based on attention. I think that will be a pretty killer widget. I don’t know of any other servce that could provide that.
Any others that I am missing? I would like a widget to manage relationships in social networks (linkedIn, FaceBook, MySpace, in addition to the services listed above). Does anyone know if anything like that exists?
I think that the services I am choosing to actually use say alot about what I want from web tools. Twitter, Plazes, and Flickr are services that I interact with almost solely using my phone. I send updates to these 3 services about what I am doing, where I am going, and what I am seeing. They take very little effort for me to add to my normal workflow (and are immediately accessible since I just push content via SMS).
Last.fm, MyBlogLog, and statzen are even easier to use. They just observe and share. Last.fm observes what I am listening to in iTunes and on my iPod and shares that information. MyBlogLog observes who is stopping by jaxn.org and shares that (while providing some social-networking). The goal of the statzen widget(s) is to watch what people (you) are actually reading (on jaxn.org and in my feeds) and then provide easy navigation to that content. They require absolutely no (additional) effort on my part to update.
These services make my blog’s sidebar more like a living part of my life and not something that I constantly have to maintain. My blog in turn provides single point of entry to my digital life. This is the good stuff; these are the useful applications. It is like the Wei Wu Wei Web. W
Note: Twitter has the added benefit of allowing me to receive updates via the channel that is most convenient for me at the time. In a way, that almost makes it like passive content consumption.
Additional thought: If I get selected for the Dash Express beta program, how could would it be to have updates sent to Plazes via Dash? It would be completely passive location sharing. Of course it would probably be easier to do the same thing with a GPS enabled phone.
