Fresh off a $12 million capital infusion, Six Apart has joined the widget revolution, opening up its blog platform for developers to create companion applications for TypePad. So far, 33 TypePad widgets are available, ranging from commerce and games to content and search–and they are free. For example, Bunchball’s widget let bloggers to interact with visitors via games and content sharing. Our own CNET Webshots lets bloggers share their photo albums via a widget. Search engines Eurekster, Jobster, Kosmix, Rollyo, SimplyHired, Sphere and Technorati have created TypePad widgets. One True Media allows bloggers to create and embed videos into blog entries, and Zazzle lets TypePad bloggers to earn money sales their designs.
I am pretty hopeful that a widget/gadget standard emerges, but I’m really not holding my breath because the initial design constraints are so different for the various systems. Microsoft’s Live.com team, to their credit, does seem interested in at least documenting their APIs to the point where we could support their widgets by cloning them, but those sorts of things will (I’m assuming) get lower priority as Vista goes into crunch time. Maybe next year? 🙂