Widget provider JS-Kit has released their latest widget this morning, Score. Score adds a thumbs up/thumbs down-style ratings widget to any page content, and then aggregates the data across the entire web site into an info box that can highlight a site’s top content. It can also integrate with JS-Kit’s Navigator offering, which pulls ratings data from other JS-Kit widgets into a central location. In effect, that turns any site into a walled Digg-like ratings community, where users can vote up top content that can then be highlighted by site owners.
JS-Kit was founded in 2006 and raised $1.2 million from The Entrepreneurs’ Fund 3 last August. The company now offers 5 distinct widget services for web publishers and the Navigator widget that ties them together.
A source tells us that JS-Kit is gearing up to announce a handful of major publisher partnerships in the next few weeks. These partnerships will push out JS-Kit’s widgets to over 20 million new users.
What makes JS-Kit’s set of widgets — which also includes comments, polls, and reviews — really attractive is how easily they integrate into pages. Widgets generally take just a single line of JavaScript code to get up and running, and no sign up in required. If I’ve done this properly, a JS-Kit Score widget should appear at the bottom of this post and allow you to rate it.
Of course, because this is the only page on ReadWriteWeb that is running a Score widget, it won’t have any data on which content is the highest rated site wide. But the ease of installation is what really catches the eye. JS-Kit is building a suite of tools for web publishers that are modular in nature — pick and choose which you want to use, and they all play nice and integrate with one another via the Navigator.