Ok, time to write about something interesting, so here we go....

Today we here at Zoomshare released a new feature to our service called Widgets. As spooniep outlined in the forums Widgets allows Zoomshare users to embed multimedia and interactive features into their pages without extensive knowledge of web development languages such as Javascript. In this instance all of the developers here can apply their web development knowledge in a way that others can take advantage of, for just about any web page in their Zoomshare site. To that end some of the Widgets to be released in the coming months include adding a clock, poll or page counter to one’s site.

Of course, these are nice features, but nothing revolutionary, people have been creating and adding page counters to their sites since the web began. The really cool feature of Widgets is the ability to share content across all websites, Zoomshare or not. In this sense, Zoomshare Widgets is a flexible tool for sharing along the lines of other Web Widgets such as Google’s Desktop and Gadgets or MS Vista’s Sidebar and Widgets. In fact, while it hasn’t been a main goal of this release and thus is unsupported, our Zoomshare Widgets should be interchangeable with those widget platforms.

This is where most of my time in the last few months has gone into developing the basic framework and in creating the first widget that truly takes advantage of this new ability, Flipbook. With Flipbook a Zoomshare user can post any of their photo albums on any web page, Zoomshare or not, with the placement of a small snippet of code. In this way a Zoomshare user can share their photo album(s) in just about any web-based service they use, including social networks, blogs, wikis, forums and of course Zoomshare.

For example, I have a website dedicated to my upcoming wedding at http://wedding.weinstein.org. The site is hosted on Zoomshare and my fiancé and I can use the Zoomshare tools to create and manage the site’s content, including photos. Until now anyone who wished to view the photos would have to visit a specific album, such as http://wedding.weinstein.org/ 6.shtml/Family to see any of the photos. Moreover, the viewing of individual images in an album is a bit tedious. Enter Widgets and Flipbook. With a little cut and paste of code provided to me from our new Widget tool I can share the Family album within this site, pdw @ zoomshare, in this specific blog entry and each image can be viewed without having to leave this blog entry.

Cool right?

Better yet, I can provide this code to family and friends, as shown below, and all they would need to do is cut and paste it into their own web page.

<!--zoomshare embed code begin-->

<script src="http://www.zoombricks.com/bricks/1.0/?url= http://www.zoombricks.com/bricks/1.0/album/album.xml&site= http%3A%2F%2Fwedding.weinstein.org/:album? album=Family&output=js"> </script>

<!--zoomshare embed code end-->

This being version 1.0 there are a few kinks to work out, but this simple example of sharing content across websites only scratches the surface (as I’ve alluded to in untested possibilities). So stay tuned, plenty of cool things to come from widgets!