Written by Jay Fortner and edited by Richard MacManus

Widgets are becoming increasingly important in sharing and displaying content over the web. Recently we chatted with two companies, Pickle and Cellblock, that provide photo and video widgets. Each service allows multi-user contributions to their widgets - forget user-generated content, these are user-generated widgets!

The widgets can be placed nearly anywhere on the web - blogs, social networks, etc. You can send photos and videos to your widget, directly from your computer or mobile phone - sharing your media with the world instantly. The kind of functionality these services offer is really taking viral media to another level; and what’s more both Pickle and Cellblock have launched some pretty important features in the past 24 hours.

Pickle

Pickle has re-packaged several of their features, creating a widget media player that will operate on MySpace. It works by streaming photo and video content from users desktops or mobile phones.

"We've taken some of the capabilities that have been available with Pickle for a while, and recombined [them] to put some of those features more front and center", John Funge, CEO of Pickle, told Read/WriteWeb.

These features include:

• the ability to share content from a cell phone or computer desktop to a "channel";
• each channel displays photos and videos back to back;
• one-click full screen player opens directly from the widget (unlike YouTube, which re-directs you back to their site)

Users can contribute content to a Pickle channel in several ways, depending on the privacy levels determined by the channel's owner. Users can click the "add to contribute" button found on the player, which opens up an upload page; or they can email their content.

Cellblock

Cellblock has been developing a multifaceted application for the sharing of media content. They recently released an embeddable widget, which has an offline desktop component as well. Their experience building social network Gloto, where users enjoyed real-time collaboration, encouraged Eric Conn (co-founder of Cellblock) and his team to create a specialized tool that enables real-time collaboration in widgets too. Cellblock’s widgets include:

• desktop component, allowing inclusion of media direct from users computers;
• inclusion of media from a broad range of devices (PDAs, cameras, mobile phones, etc);
• the ability to create a cellblock from your mobile phone;
• a Skype Cellblock plugin

Cellblock's drag-and-drop function was just released yesterday, and should make for very easy additions to users Cellblock widgets.

Conclusion

As the world of social networking has exploded in popularity over the past year or two, the viral nature of the Internet has taken hold of the world. YouTube took one huge aspect of social networking and made it portable, by allowing users to embed videos on other sites. Photobucket took another aspect of social networking and enabled users to import images from one huge site to another. Cellblock and Pickle are bringing the viral nature of media to another level, by making it instant and collaborative as well as portable and mobile.