There are lots of services emerging that let you enhance, customise or "pimp" your myspace profile. One of the best ways to do this is with a "widget" of some description. Widgets are a good way of adding colour and content to your myspace profile without making it completely unreadable and unusable. Widgets typically work by letting you paste in a bit of text/ code into your profile which links to the widget site and serves up your photos, videos or other stuff in the widget on your myspace profile.
For web businesses, creating these kind of widgets is a great way to gain users. Pete Cashmore of the Mashable blog calls this "Feeding the myspace beast" which is a great way to describe the strategy. At the moment it is mainly silicon valley startups that are building myspace widgets, it will be interesting to see if any big media companies start getting clued up to this over the next year or so.
Here's a quick run-down of some of these widget tools.
Photos
Slide creates a sweet-looking flash photo slideshow which you can embed into your myspace profile as a way round the 12 photo limit in the photo gallery and a better alternative to posting pictures directly. The slides look quality on your profile with a nice white ipod-esque design and you can choose different sizes. and so on.
Here's one I made earlier showing off some of the photos of people promoting themselves on myspace.
Rock You is an alternative to slide which is better suited to making a short slideshow with captions and so on and also doesnt require you do download a client to your PC - you can just make it online. You dont even need to register - just enter an email address.
Here's a Rockyou effort knocked up in 1 minute:
Videos and multimedia
Stickam is a multimedia widget that lets you upload videos and audio as well as photos. You can also stream live video onto it from a webcam and use it as a chat system. The registration process is a bit of a pain to be honest - they need to take a leaf out of RockYou's book.
This took about a million times longer than the others to create btw.
| Get Stickam for Free. |
Abazab lets you upload video to what they call a "Playbox" which sits on your myspace profile. Your mates can also upload stuff onto it too. This service has only just come out of Beta so its early days but it could be a good-un.
Here's my playbox.
Hotlists
Nabbr lets you "broadcast your stuff" by creating a list of films, music, books, DVDs, fashion or anything really that you rate. You can choose from the stuff already on the site or create your own items. Could be quite a good visual way of showing what kind of books, music etc you like rather than using a text list in the myspace "About Me" section.
Here's a quick one using some of the default items:
Mypicklist lets you share links to products and your reviews of them e.g. DVDs, music etc and you get a share of the cash if people go on to buy them. You have to link to partner sites to get this revenue share (e.g. amazon, eBay etc).
News Feeds
Feedostyle lets you create a widget showing headlines from a blog, website or other source by just pasting in the RSS feed link. Most blogs and websites have RSS feeds now if you look for them or you can use the default sites instead. Could be quite cool on a myspace profile to have a feed of news from your football team perhaps or something personal like that.
Nooz lets you add news stories and websites you like to a ticker box or list on your myspace. There's a really cool bookmarklet you just drag onto your browser which lets you add stories really easily. This could be good for music news about your favorite bands or somthing.
There's loads more of these things emerging all the time - will probably try and put together a full list in the near future.
Hiya!
Just dropping you a note to say thanks for your encouragement re: abazab.com.
If you have any additional feedback or questions, please feel free to contact us.
Cheers!
MJ
Posted by: minjung | 05 July 2006 at 07:39 PM
Feedostyle doesn't work with Myspace.
Posted by: David | 18 July 2006 at 11:10 PM
When you get a chance, please let us know your feedback to some of the other features that abazab has put into our widget. Have you tried the private messaging or share to other playbox functions?
Posted by: MJ | 22 July 2006 at 03:07 AM
Hi there! That's a cool list of stuff! I have also seen nice list of Myspace widgets here Anybody knows other good sources?
Posted by: Hexer | 16 August 2006 at 08:31 PM
ooopsss! Here, meaning at www.myspace-widgets.com.
Posted by: hexer | 16 August 2006 at 08:33 PM
I found some humor widgets - show rotaing jokes, worst pick-up lines etc.
It's something new I haven't seen yet, quite funny. :)
http://funny4myspace.com/funnies/myspace-funnies.php
Posted by: | 13 November 2006 at 06:47 AM
RhapSIGody.com - Rapid SIG Creator
Rapidly create a sig and display recently played music on Myspace or your own website using your Rhapsody Listening History RSS Feed information.
Posted by: RhapSIGody | 15 November 2006 at 12:58 AM
I recently found some cool photo widgets at goodwidgets.com....I like the name :) They are actually some of the best photo widgets I have seen on myspace.
Posted by: Kim | 01 December 2006 at 06:00 AM
I agree...goodwidgets.com has the best looking widgets. They are much better than the competitors.
Posted by: kelly | 05 December 2006 at 02:34 PM
There is a great FREE VOICE MAIL widget available from LiveMatch.com
It gives you voice mail from your web page and if two people are online at the same time they can use it to instant voice message each other. http://livematch.com/voicemail/
Posted by: Jack | 15 December 2006 at 09:49 PM
cool new widgets for myspace.
http://www.formlogix.com/gadgets.aspx
Posted by: benny | 15 January 2007 at 09:46 AM
Check out our site at www.carebadges.com
We have cool widgets around social causes! Put a badge for a cause that you care about on the site! We are trying to raise awareness (impressions) and money for social causes. Thanks!
- and we would love your feedback
Saar
Posted by: saar | 12 February 2007 at 06:44 AM
have you guys heard of shazam, it recognizes music you play down your mobile by sending you an sms back - very cool.
anyway you can embed your tag chart into your myspace page people know what you've been tagging - an you can check your friends...
Posted by: hugh | 17 May 2007 at 03:14 PM
Evilness knows no bounds!
Posted by: MagicInviter | 10 July 2007 at 08:24 AM
this is a fun new voice player widget from getabuz.com called voice messager. it plays your voice greeting with music in the background (you pick any song), and records voice comments from friends. http://www.getabuz.com
Posted by: jake | 30 September 2007 at 07:10 PM
Uploading Photos and Videos to MySpace
Uploading photos to your MySpace account is fairly simple. First you must log into your account and then click on the links that says, "Add/edit photos." You then receive a warning stating that photos which include nudity, violent or offensive materials or copyrighted images are not permitted. You can then browse through your hard drive to find the desired photo. Photos uploaded to MySpace must be .gif or .jpg format and must be smaller than 600k. Once you find an appropriate photo, click upload and the photo will be added to your account. Once a photo is added you can create a caption for this photo.
http://articlecillin.com/uploading-photos-and-videos-a192.html
Posted by: zhafran | 20 January 2008 at 02:53 PM