Wowzio crossed the 3 billion mark ...

Wowzio crossed the 3 billion mark this week, i.e. the number of widgets served by the Wowzio platform. In less than 5 months, we went from 2 billion to 3 billion, so that translates to ~210 million/month. We continue to be ranked in the top 200 by Quantcast ( currently at 157 ).

As we continue to serve more widgets, we have been working behind the scenes to streamline our service, and make things more efficient. Sometimes these are small tweaks, and sometimes they are bigger projects, like pruning our database. In some cases, we might also deprecate a feature, like we did with deprecating auto-tags generation.

Please continue to send us your invaluable feedback.

Deprecating Auto Generation of Tags

Effective tomorrow, we will stop auto generating tags for blog posts which have not been tagged by bloggers directly. The biggest factor in this decision was our dependence on Yahoo!'s Term Extraction API, which we used to generate tags.

In the past year, Yahoo has moved away from search, outsourcing it to Microsoft. And they are also pulling out from other areas that they feel are well aligned with their vision for the future. We commend Yahoo! on taking these bold ( and sometimes not-so-popular ) steps, and are also thankful to them for providing this API to us for free all this time.

But we also felt that now was the right time to stop depending on this API, as we are unsure how well the quality will hold up with time.

Needless to say, to bloggers, we suggest that you make sure you put appropriate tags in each of your blog posts.

iPhone App for your Blog

On the Wowzio Widget Designer, you will now notice a new button called 'iPhone', in the 'One-Click Install' section. Your blog readers can now read and consume your blog using any of wowzio's widget on their iPhone. In a simple 2-step process, they can install a wowzio widget on their iPhone as a web app.

Bloggers, you can now install the 'Live Activity' Wowzio App on your iPhone, and watch in real-time from anywhere as users visit your blog.

We are looking to roll out Wowzio widget Apps on other mobile platforms, and would like to hear from you your platform of choice. Email us at feedback@wowzio.com or use our feedback form.

Ad supported widgets

We've had a great past 12 months. We served out over 2 billion widgets ( thats right ) during this time period, grew our installed base, and rolled out a bunch of tools for bloggers. The Wowzio blog network is now ranked in the top 200 by Quantcast.

Over the next few weeks, we will experiment with supporting our widgets with ads. While we don't know what the final form will be, we do know the goals we've set for ourselves as we go down this path, they are:

• The widgets should continue to serve their primary purpose as well as they currently do, which is to help users discover great content on blogs
  
• The widgets should continue to enhance the aesthetics of the blog as well as they currently do. ( i.e. look like an integral module of the blog ).
  

As always, we would love to hear from you, so that we can factor your ideas into our rollout. Email us at feedback@wowzio.com or use our feedback form.

Images in Wowzio widgets - bug fixed

One of our users ( Sebastian @ ZoomiLife ) reported a bug last week, where all the images in the photo gallery widget for his blog were missing.

After investigation, we were able to zero in on the problem. Our image servers had cached bad image files from the ZoomiLife blog from sometime around mid-august. Most likely the blog had some images related issues at the time, where it was returning bad images. These bad images were stuck in our cache, they wouldn't make way
for good images. We pushed out a fix to this problem yesterday.

If you notice a problem with your widgets, please get in touch with us via our feedback form or email feedback[@]wowzio[dot]com .

We really like to hear from you, and especially, if there is a problem thats impacting your blog/widgets, we would like to address it as best as we can.

Thanks.

Wowzio crossed the 2 billion mark ...

This weekend, we hit a major milestone. Since we launched last summer ( 2008 ), we have served up 2 billion widgets. Another important landmark we crossed was when the Wowzio Network reached into the top 200 as per Quantcast - see Wowzio Network's Stats on Quantcast ( currently at 176 )

We would like to take this opportunity to thank all the bloggers who have found our widgets interesting and useful, who have installed our widgets and provided us with their candid feedback. We have launched a few useful tools for bloggers, since our initial launch, here's a quick recap :
Geo-Popularity Platform : as the name suggests, it is a web-scale platform, that computes popularity of blog posts
Real-Time Whats Hot on your blog : see which posts are getting read the most on your blog right now ...
Wowzio Pulse : bubbles up popular & recent blog posts & news articles for a given tag or topic
Popular Posts : for a blog is computed over 3 intervals ( last 24 hours, last 7 days, and last 4 weeks )

One of the complaints we hear often is why we continue to stay in an invite-only mode. There's 2 reasons for that :
1. We want to make sure our widgets are being used by good quality blogs, that contains family friendly content and is not intented for a private audience.
2. We also want to contain our infrastructure & serving costs.

We are now working on our next set of product/feature launches, which we hope to announce soon.

"Real-Time Whats Hot" on your blog

You have just posted a new blog article, and it gets dugg ( or stumbled, buzz'd, sphere'd, twittered or even picked up by a major newswire ), resulting in high traffic. Wouldn't you like to find out about this right away, so you could make sure you take the right action(s) to maximize on the opportunity that has presented itself.

Another scenerio is where you are trying something new with a blog post, and would like to see how well it is able to pull readers, in real time.

Wowzio's "Real-Time Whats Hot" provides a real-time view of your blog posts that readers are engaging with, right NOW. To see what it looks like for the 'Filmonic' blog, click on http://www.wowzio.com/blogs/realtimewhatshot?ids=53144 . You'll notice that we have aggregated the referring domains for each blog posts on the "Whats Hot" page. One can also drill down into a detail view for a blog post by clicking on the corr. "more" link, eg. http://www.wowzio.com/blogs/realtimetrafficpost?ids=53144&articleid=19239527

For your blog, you can find the link to your 'Real-Time Whats Hot' page on your 'seewidgets' page. In our example 'Filmonic' blog, that page is at http://www.wowzio.com/widgets/seewidgets?ids=53144

All that is needed to make this feature work is a Wowzio widget ( or badge ) for your blog, to be installed on your blog.

This feature has been built using our 'Geo-Popularity Platform'. For more info. and details, please click here.

An often received requests from bloggers ( especially those who installed the Live Activity widget ), was asking us if they could see a longer list of visitors on their blog. So we had been thinking about this request for some time, and have come up with "Real-Time Whats Hot" that we feel is a bit more useful.

As usual, we would love to hear your feedback, via our feedback form or via email to feedback[at]wowzio[dot]com .