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.
