Another now-obvious idea, not exactly a new concept but fairly
well honed by Microsoft. As
Dare
puts it:
If you see a cool gadget on someone's space that you'd like to
add to your space or portal page, all you need to do is click the
'+' in the top-right corner of the gadget as shown in the
screenshot below and viola
- a bassy violin appears on your own space. Great trick, but the
big drawback is being tied to a particular environment,
Windows Live Spaces in this
case. Not altogether web-friendly.
I've seen quite a few portal/service kind of sites that offer a
customisable chunk of HTML you can paste into your own site, e.g.
the Flickr "
badge" and
Google's custom search box. But the distribution point from these
is generally centralised. Far better to have something that
provides the add-to-my-site facility with every local
deployment.
Ideally this would be a single-click affair. I've lost track if
the Atom protocol has any coverage for specific aspects of a site,
but it certainly seems feasible to have a sidebar section defined
as a series of potentially postable entries, those entries
potentially having some kind of dynamic content. The "get gadget"
link would fire a script to pass across the gadget code.
Another approach (which might use the APP) would be through
Live/
Web Clipboard
- copy the gadget from another page to your own.Â
The low budget way is the traditional HTML copy and paste, but
even that might be semi-automated with a bit of script.
Where the gadget depends on some central service (which would
probably be majority of cases), an aim that favoured viral
distribution would be for the end user to collect and deploy the
gadget themselves with minimal interaction with the central
service, i.e. transparent from deployment siteA to siteB.
But what constitutes a gadget is another question
altogether...Â
Â
@en