After my initial blogs about Widgetbox and creating a facebook app (Pitch to the Dragons). I thought I’d investigate what sort of fun widget I could create using flash and Widgetbox.

I love fonejacker – It’s one quality program with some excellent characters. It’s also a tv show that lends itself to a little application that lets you here from all the best characters on the show. So I set about creating a flash app that lets the user select a character and then play a series of sound clips from the show.

Once complete I set this up as a facebook widget through using Widgetbox. Once again the process was very easy and within minutes (although the flash app took me several hours!) the widget was up and running.

So… five stars again for Widgetbox.

If you have facebook you can add the fonejacker tv-soundbox to your profile.

It contains all the best characters such as Terry Tibbs, Brian Betonde, The mouse, George Agdgdgwngo, Mr Doovde and the Chinese lad who likes to pirate dvds! I only added this to facebook and promoted it in a few fonejacker groups a couple of days ago and it has already surpassed the dragons app I did weeks ago.

If you haven’t got facebook, you can take a look and play around with it here.

I’ve also included some code on the page incase you would like to embed it in your own website.

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.

.:Neil Smith Designs:. Web Design and Development » widgetbox

Widget box – fonejacker quotes tv-soundbox

Use Widgetbox to promote your blog