The widget is configurable to pair down either categories or companies; it’s shown here circumscribed to a particular category, embeddable widgets, but allows voting for any of the three finalists.

Here’s how the finalists in the embeddable widget category are campaigning: 

- Clearspring and Qoof in blog posts, and

- Sprout with a dedicated domain featuring the widget and a video.

Voting deadline is Sunday.

It took almost a year for my Obama inauguration countdown widget to reach a thousand users on iGoogle (and Blogger) and also just over 1,000 on Facebook.

In 10 days on Clearspring the widget is at 397 installs.

Update: Then, 2,500 all in one day at day 17.  I’m still trying to figure out what triggered that. Let me know if you’ve seen it publicized or featured in a gallery.

It’s just one datapoint, but if anybody asks me I’d definitely have to recommend listing widgets on Clearspring.

My “Search this” widget? Not so promising. It’s been on Clearspring for 9 days and sits at a pitiful 13 installs. I attribute the difference to 1) fondness for Obama and a desire to show it 2) the popularity of countdowns—it’s become a standard genre in widgetry while a search box as widget isn’t like anything people are familiar with.

The search widget also takes some daily maintenance to keep the searches current. The time sink, along with the widget’s sad wallflower stature right out of the box, makes me start thinking about abandoning it. But not just yet. Ideas that don’t catch on might be stupid ideas, but sometimes they’re just not understood. I’m still having fun with it, and I’m learning something, which is valuable to me: I’m doing some experimentation with tricky Expression Engine templates in templates, which I’m thinking of writing up as a tutorial. 

Netvibes announced it will support Google’s OpenSocial specification, it’s been reported by Techcrunch’s Erick Schonfeld.

At the same time, Netvibes, the French company that makes the popular start page, says it will offer variable layouts, including a magazine-style start page. You can check out movies of the new options over on Techcrunch.

What I want? A canvas that lets you drag widgets around, disrespecting any grid, and resize them at will like windows on your desktop, or images within Photoshop, or Colorforms on their background.

I played around with a pre-coded console a few months that allows moving and resizing. I call it pre-coded because, unlike a real start page like iGoogle or Netvibes, it doesn’t let you choose widgets for it. It comes with widgets chosen for you. I designed it (actually, barely prototyped it) specifically to listen to NewsGang Live recordings, while following the chat that was happening at the time of the live recording, and while browsing the Tweet stream of regular participants and followers. 

Steve Gillmor recommended, and I agree, that it—and other pages containing distributed content—cries out for not just resizing and moving properties for the widgets, but the ability to save the positions and sizes of the widgets. I know that’s a possibility with Javascript; it knows how to report those numbers and I’m sure they can be captured. I’m just not clever enough with Javascript (yet) to make it happen. 

Netvibes is more popular than I imagined, at least among people who like Barack Obama. Since I put the inauguration countdown widget on Clearspring a week ago, almost as many Netvibes users as Google users have added it, maybe a 2:3 ratio, Netvibes to iGoogle. And remember that Google gadgets work in other places, though in my experience the other places are almost always blogs of the Google-owned Blogger service. 

Videos are up from the Nov. 24 OpenSocial birthday gathering when developers and platform reps talked about the future. OpenSocial 0.9 is due out Dec. 19.

There are 600 million users across all the OpenSocial containers now. Sure, your widget won’t be seen by them all, not by a long shot, but the possibilities of a coalition like that are… well, forgive me, but it’s thrilling.