Widget fail
When we built the Loudcrowd Widget, we wanted a simple turnkey way for users to spread it — the two most commonly used platforms are currently Gigya and Clearspring.
I’m glad Montoya enjoyed Loudcrowd enough to want to throw it on his profile. Needless to say we’ve been less than enthused with the way Gigya has performed, especially on Facebook and Tumblr. We made a choice of a vendor to try and allow the widgets to be posted as widely as possible, but considering most of the Conduit Labs team are FB & Tumblr people, it’s particularly unfortunate that it performs so badly on both platforms. I still can’t believe that neither Clearspring nor Gigya offers Tumblr as a choice for sharing.
Clearly, we’ll need to switch.
I tried posting a new Loudcrowd widget to my Facebook profile. The widget is set up via Gigya, which clamis to be “the leader in widget … distribution.” They took me to a Facebook app, that adds the widget to my inventory, and then gives me the option to add their profile box to my profile. When the preview came up, it looked wrong. I added it to my “boxes” tab, and sure enough, the widget showed up but it didn’t work. I think it has something to do with the widget being loaded through an iframe.
Look, let’s put it simply: if you are going to rely on a distribution network, you should actually make sure it works. Otherwise you might be wondering why your results are dismal. Listen up, Loudcrowd… if you would like to put your product, or even just your widgets, on Facebook, drop me a line: contact[at]mappdev.com. I can make it happen for cheap.
