Apple’s Sept 1st 2010 Keynote was in my opinion even better than their June 7th presentation when they announced the iPhone 4. It may be a case of expectations being so high for the new “king of the smartphones” announcement that Steve Jobs was really in a no-win situation back in June. But I think with the grand reveal of their new iPod range, Apple TV (let’s please stop calling it iTV now!) and the sneaky dip into social networking with the announcement of Ping, this was one hell of a keynote.

As a side – I think the new nano looks fantastic and integrating a camera into the iPod touch to enable Facetime is a master stroke, but that’s another blog.

I want to talk about Ping. By integrating Ping into iTunes, Apple have opened up Ping to a mere 160m users in one foul swoop, that’s impressive. It’s what Google will do if they base their new social media offering on YouTube, so they must be watching with bated breath to see what happens.

By integrating social media into iTunes, Apple are saying this is “A Social Network for Music”. But I have to wonder how much this is just to keep Facebook happy, as in reality this is a social network for Music, Books, Films and Apps – many of which are Games.
Lets look at that list again…

1. Muisc
2. Books
3. Films
4. Games

Now if we look at what people talk about on Facebook and Twitter, we can see a large portion of that activity is based around those 4 topics.

Therefore we have the platform for wide discussion. Now all we need is to open this up to a wide audience.
Lets consider Apples hardware with iTunes installed ready and waiting, – First we have Macs (1.6m – 1.7m sold per quarter!)
- iPhones (8.7m sold per quarter)
- iPod Touch (3.2m sold per quarter)
So that’s a lot of platforms running iTunes. But wait. Did we miss something? Something that might open up Ping to an even wider audience. Something I’ve probably even already mentioned in this blog… that’s it… Apple TV.

This is where the killer blow could be made. If Apple market their TV offering with all guns blazing they could revolutionise the social networking arena.

Just imagine people networking over their TV. Talking about what Film they are watching. One word. Awesome. Listen to music your friends are into, after all they’re your friends because you probably have similar taste. Read books they like and watch films they are in to.

We could even go a step further and imagine what could happen if we stick a webcam on top of the TV and open up Facetime for Apple TV users. The possibilities are endless.

Apple has seriously lined its ducks up. They could dominate in so many areas – Music consumption, Mobile communications, social networking, TV. Will there really be any hours in the day you don’t find yourself interacting with Apple?

I came across Widgetbox when I was looking into developing a Facebook widget I had an idea for. As with most bloggers I want as many people as possible reading my posts, so I look into every avenue of marketing my website. The social network boom has made this an obvious place to look, with every person having so many friends viral marketing has never been able to spread so fast.

For my Facebook application I delved into FBML and already had knowledge of php so was able to develop my widget in about a week. However when I came across Widgetbox it looked on the surface like I could have saved time simply registering and going through their wizard.

That wasn’t quite the case although the features it does support are still quite impressive.
With php and mysql you can obviously create a far superior application than what is basically possible on Widgetbox. But it does let you interface with Flash and Javascript so there is scope to make a decent application.
As it interacts with Flash there are already loads of games that have been made into Widgets.

However the quickest and easiest way of creating a widget is by first creating a Blidget. This is a Widget of your Blog.
Widgetbox guides you through the process seamlessly, even loading Facebook within a frame to enable you to set up the necessary parameters.
You can then promote your new widget through Facebook, through a blidget promo badge you post on your website or on other social networking sites such as MySpace or Bebo.

You see, even though I’ve banged on about facebook, Widgetbox supports the OpenSocial container as well. Although Facebook is not developed on the OpenSocial platform and is at the moment the most used platform, OpenSocial is Googles attempt at standardising social networking… and I wouldn’t bet against Google winning in the long run, would you?

So all in all Widgetbox is a great tool for developing a widget to promote your blog really easily.
Infact you can install my Widget to have a look at what it’s like by clicking on the “Get My Widget for your site” on the left hand side of this page.

It looks like this…

I’ve only touched the surface of what Widgetbox can offer, but I can see that it will help loads of people out there spread their hard work to a far reaching audience. ]]> http://www.neilsmithdesigns.co.uk/blog/2008/12/use-widgetbox-to-promote-your-blog/feed/ 1