The following is from a handout I developed for my presentation on the use of widgets in online retail at the Shop.org Strategy & Innovation Forum earlier this year. It's a checklist of widget best practices. Enjoy! (There's also a Word doc version of this available for download: widget_checklist.doc.)

Thinking of developing a widget for folks' desktops, mobile phones, blogs, or social networks (e.g. Facebook or MySpace)? First off, you need to decide what type of widget you're going to be developing. There are three types:

• Desktop (or Dashboard) Widget: Installed on your computer. Platforms include Yahoo Widgets, the OS X Dashboard, and the Windows Vista sidebar. One example is the customer-developed widget for the Mac that monitors availability of the daily product at Woot (http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/shopping/ wootcom.html).
• Web Widget: For your blog or social media app like Facebook, MySpace, etc. One example of this is the LastFM widget (http://www.last.fm/widgets/) which allows you to "share your music anywhere."
• Mobile Widget: For mobile phones on the DotMobi domain, as well as iPhone-specific widgets. Some examples at https://www.widsets.com/index

When planning and developing your widget, it might be helpful to keep the following in mind...

FUNCTIONALITY / UTILITY
• Is your widget useful to your target audience? What's the hook (incentive) that will compel them to install it or use it? Does the widget solve the user’s business problems? Does it save them time or money, or make them more productive? Users listen to WII-FM ("What's In It For Me?").
• Are the functions your widget provides on-message with your brand?
• Is the data delivered by the widget always fresh and up-to-date?
• Are there features that leverage the community of users?
• Does your widget have the capacity to go viral? In other words, is it contagious? And is it "slippery" – in other words, easy to share or distribute to friends?

FINANCIAL
• Is your widget ROI positive?
• What are your objectives? Brand building? PR? Links? Lead generation? Driving conversions? Increasing the customer's AOV?
• Set realistic marketing and ecommerce goals for the widget and track success.
• What is your budget for widget development and maintenance? What if your widget is a huge hit…do you have an action plan in place to upgrade all aspects of service?

PERFORMANCE & RELIABILITY
• Monitor and evaluate the widget's server reliability (uptime). Fully QA and stress test the widget.
• Determine the widget's loading time and optimize it for maximum performance.
• If it's a blog widget, make sure it doesn't hold up the rest of the blogger's page from loading quickly if the server that serves up your widget becomes unresponsive.
• What is your adoption rate of your widget? Conduct traffic volume scalability testing to ensure your widget's servers can cope.

TECHNICAL
• If a web widget, does its HTML code validate?
• Is the widget code well-documented (for the benefit of your programmers)?
• If a web widget, will updated versions of the widget require that the blogger/webmaster update your code they inserted into their template?
• If it's a Flash-based widget, does it have an HTML wrapper?

USABILITY AND ACCESSIBILITY
• Evaluate the usability of the widget's user interface and of the installation process (via surveys, focus groups, and/or usability consultants).
• Does your widget follow the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) principle? Don't try to make the widget do too many things; stay focused.
• Design your widget for the market you are targeting. Use language that they identify with.
• Consider allowing the user installing the widget to customize its look to their own tastes.
• Check for browser compatibility on various versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc.
• Check for platform compatibility on various versions of Windows, Mac, Linux.
• Conduct international usability tests. Does the widget offer localized content for international users? Has the widget been translated into foreign languages?
• Is the site mobile device friendly?
• Is the widget usable for people with disabilities?
• If a blog widget, is the widget printer friendly? Or does it mess up the formatting of the page when printed?

SEO
• Don't neglect PageRank as your incentive to build widgets. If nothing else, a good widget can serve as link bait, driving lots of inbound links to your web site.
• Web widgets can pass PageRank from the website where the widget is placed to your site, but only if done correctly. To help increase your chances of the links being counted for PageRank:
• If your widget is coded in JavaScript, place your text links outside the JavaScript, or use a "noscript" tag.
• If coded in Flash, you can utilize progressive enhancement or an HTML "wrapper".
• For iframe widgets, place your text links outside the iframe, or use a "noframe" tag.
• The best widgets for SEO are WordPress widgets (written in PHP) or HTML-based widgets because the widget's HTML code, including links and content, is fully accessible to spiders and integrated into the rest of the blog's HTML. WordPress widgets are similar to WordPress plugins.
• Include relevant keywords in the anchor text of the links back to your site. For example, instead of a link saying, "Your Brand," spice it up some and say "Your Brand's Weather Widget," or other keyword text that describes what your widget is about.
• If it's a blog widget, have a plugin version of it for major blog platforms such as WordPress. Thus the links and content generated by the widget will become integrated into the rest of the blog's HTML code, and the links will appear more "real" to the search engines.
• Create your links with a "target=_blank" code so that webmasters are less inclined to remove the link. Some webmasters believe that widgets "steal' traffic from their website or blog.

I'm here at the Web 2.0 Expo. Sat in on the session today "An Overview of Badges and Widgets: The Fast Rise of Viral Web Parts".

Before I get into the content of the session, I have just a couple of remarks. These come from me and not from the session presenter...

• Badges and widgets CAN be amazing link bait. If it's a useful widget and if it's launched properly AND if the widget incorporates links back to your site in the right way, it can go viral and start building up your link popularity and PageRank.
• Inherently the widgets placed on other people's websites aren't helping your PageRank. That's because most widgets are based on AJAX, JavaScript, or Flash -- and links that are inside a Flash movie or within a JavaScript program are not treated like normal links by the search engine spiders. You need to think out-of-the-box if you want to capture PageRank from the page on which the widget is placed. That's not to say you won't get PageRank from bloggers talking about your widgets on their blogs, because you will. It's just that the widget itself won't (typically) pass PageRank.
• I think plugins (e.g. WordPress plugins) should have been included in the presenter's list of viral web components. Plugins can be amazing link bait. We at Netconcepts are starting to witness this for ourselves with our SEO Title Tag plugin for WordPress. I'm hoping to get to the point that the plugin page on our site beats out our home page in terms of PageRank score. Which is a tall order when you consider that our home page fluctuates between a 7 and an 8!

Anyways, here are my notes from the session...

• An emergent phenomenon is web sites with "portable" content and functionality.
• Forrester Research says portable content is a key trend.
• There is limited business value in being on a single site.... YouTube and Google are showing the industry what's possible.
• There's a trend towards the "atomization" of content. Small pieces are easier to reuse and more general purpose. Microformats are the smallest pieces.
• Exploit Jakob nielsen's Law of Web User Experience, that "users spend most of their time on other websites". Design your products and services to leverage this fact.
• Spread your product beyond the boundaries of your site: badges, widgets, gadgets, apis, syndication.
• It should be end-user friendly.
• Build on the shoulders of giants: leveraging widgets and APIs from Yahoo, Amazon and thousands of others.
• It's automated mass servicing of markets of low demand content and functionality (The Long Tail).
• Widgets are small applications or bits of functionality that can be embedded on the web -- can be AJAX or Flash.
• Badges are displays of content pulled under the covers from other sites.
• Gadgets are more formal widget models from Google and Microsoft.
• There's a widget standard under consideration by the W3C.
• Netvibes offers a universal widget architecture.
• Google and Microsoft have their own gadget initiatives. Both have a developer community.
• Ease of consumption and distribution is critically important. Copy and paste is best -- e.g. a single line of Javascript or object/embed tags for Flash.
• Connect to their underlying sites to provide value.
• Have a business model baked deeply into it -- driving site traffic, content consumption, advertising, etc.
• Widgets are often virally self-distributable, triggering network effects.
• Build a simple "dashboard" and applications (aka mashups)
• Google Gadgets directory is broken down into desktop gadgets and web-based gadgets.
• Google Docs & Spreadsheets gadget is an excellent example of a widget for your website.
• Microsoft's gadgets directory is in the Windows Live Gallery.
• Huge directory of widgets at widgetbox.com.
• Google's AdWords widget is probably the most successful widget in history. It turns the entire web into Google's ad platform (The Long Tail of content/advertising). Purported 80% of Google's revenue comes from advertising, and 80% of that 80% comes from displays within the widget (i.e. from Google's "content network"). Key aspects of the widget: good user incentive, extreme ease of use, strong viral feedback loop.
• Widgets and badges are your front end to your APIs.
• Key design considerations include: Scalability (cost effectiveness, reliability, exploitation by others, global reach, security), Clearly thinking through the cross domain issues (sharing of personal data, will it work on mobile?, selectively allow users' personal data such as pictures or video, no security holes), IP issues (do you have a license to redistribute the content you have, can others violate the IP protections of others? and if so, what will you do about it when you put other businesses at risk with your widget?, do you widget make it hard for others to take content out of the widget?), Ease of consumption (really must be a simple copy and paste to deploy), Leverage network effects (encourage every viewer to share it with others, letting users copy the widget), end user motivation (must do something useful for them, hsaring interesting content, providing shared access to their personal data such as photos or audio or even paying them, e.g. AdSense)
• According to Programmableweb.com, there are currently over 1700 mashups.
• Small pieces, loosely joined.
• Reuse the web palette.
• Service level agreements (SLAs) will get much more interesting in a highly composite world.
• Get experience now: begin trials to offer your capabilities via services.

Inspired by yesterday's New York Times article "Some Bling for Your Blog", I put together a list of my favorite blog widgets:

• Swicki "Hot Searches" Buzzcloud (from Eurekster)
• Recent Readers (from MyBlogLog)
• Flash Photo Stream (from Flickr)
• Preview Anywhere (from Snap)
• "What Am I Doing" Twitter Badge (from Twitter)
• Film Loops (from FilmLoop)
• Number of Readers FeedCount (from Feedburner)
• "I'm online" Skype buttons (from Skype)
• del.icio.us Tagometer (from del.icio.us)
• del.icio.us Linkrolls (from del.icio.us)
• del.icio.us Network Badge (from del.icio.us)
• Timelines (from MyTimelines)
• Link Count (from Technorati)
• Polls (from PollDaddy)
• Now Playing (from SIGamp)
• BuzzBoost (from Feedburner)
• Books in my Library (from LibraryThing)

and these which are not really widgets, but plugins (for WordPress):

• Ultimate Tag Warrior (tag clouds)
• Share This (add to social bookmarking services)
• Recent Comments (recent comments in the sidebar)

Many more widgets listed in the Widgetoko and Widgetbox directories.

Just remember when "blinging" out your blog, not to overdue it. Think critically about the value to your reader of each badge / widget that you add, because it adds download time to your pages, which detracts from the user experience.

Any important blog bling that I missed?