Twitter: Major overhaul and improvement

Check out this revised, bug-fixed and polished beauty. Change your twitter status or read your favorite twitter comments using this widget. On the go. For free. Get the widget here.

We are also featured right on Twitter’s main download page, thanks a lot, guys! Check it out here!

Actually we are quite pleased to be the first official mobile application on Twitter’s download page. That shows that we must be doing something right! :-)

By the way: We are “twittering” as well about our new or updated widgets, new blog and press articles, forum talk and stuff that just comes to our minds, so here is what you can do to get wired to our Twitter updates:

Subscribe to our RSS feed

Follow us via the web on our Twitter page

Or even better: Add our timeline to your mobile Twitter widget.

These are just some of the ways how to connect to our Twitter timeline and we are absolutely positive you guys will come up with a gazillion more. One of my friends, an avid Twitter user, thought about a Twitter plugin for his cerebral cortex, this is what it looks like: ;-)

Twitter plugin for your Cerebral cortex

 

 

It’s been great working with Twitter and we want to say Thank You for the good spirit! Let’s keep on twittering!

WidSets and DW-WORLD: 1 + 1= 6

What do you get when you pair an expert in delivering the Internet to your mobile via widgets and a world-wide news broadcasting network consisting of 4,300 partner broadcast stations and more than 400 institutions from all over the world?

The answer: Six great widgets delivering the latest news from different categories like Politics, Business, World news or Soccer. The DW-WORLD widgets offers full text stories including pictures and are available in six different languages (with more to follow):

• English
• Chinese
• German
• Portugese
• Russian
• Spanish

Get a closer look and choose the language that suits you best here Also watch out for more regionalized content in different languages in the near future! We believe that delivering regional content that matters to people in addition to our numerous Web 2.0 services and worldwide brands is what makes the difference! Is there a service in your language or region that you would like to have as a widget? Why don’t you start right off in our studio and create a widget that delivers your favorite content? Want more? Check out our developer site for help on making more sophisticated widgets using our SDK. Or, tell us what you would like to see in our widget forum or drop a comment to this post.

(Thx, Sebastian)

Jaiku on WidSets

If you are not familiar with Jaiku, try it out by posting thoughts (or Jaikus) on what you're doing, how your are feeling, and so on on the Jaiku web site.

You can now also do this kind of microblogging from your Java-enabled mobile phone, since we worked together with Jyri and the guys to create a Jaiku widget. Using the widget you can access Jaiku to see where your friends are and read their latest comments. There's a long thread about the features in the WidSets Forum.

Try it out!

Fotolog and WidSets collaboration

Fotolog is a great service where people can share photos, connect with people, and exchange thoughts. And much more. Well, now Fotolog users can enjoy the service also on the mobile. We have worked together with our friends at Fotolog to create a Fotolog widget, which gets updated with photos, automatically, whenever they are posted on Fotolog

The widget is very easy to use. Just download it to your mobile phone, choose Options/WidSets/Settings, and provide a "Fotolog username".

After that you can choose if you want to see the photos of that user, of the photos of the "Friends and favourites".

Or do it on WidSets.com first, and the download it to your phone. With WidSets you have so many choices and possibilities :-)

And as with other widgets, you can also add an "Alert" to the widget.

Try it out!

Foreca and WidSets collaboration

If you would ask almost anybody out there what information they would like to have available on the mobile, it probably would be weather. And it is a global phenomena, although the most interesting weather forecasts are of course local :-)

That's why I'm proud to announce the collaboration with Foreca, with whom we created a Weather widget, so that you can get weather forecasts, wherever in the world you are. I met with Tiina a while ago. After that our teams started to work together, and now we are here.

I've been using the widget a lot this year to see what the weather is like in San Francisco. If I could propose improvements to the widget, it would be that I could set the weather to whatever I would like it to be, which in my case would be sunny and warm... But let's leave that for a future upgrade.

So, enjoy the weather - forecasts!

Netvibes and WidSets collaboration

If you don't know Netvibes you have to be from another planet, and in that case you probably don't understand anything about what I'm saying, anyway. Everybody else, read on.

We have worked together with Tariq and his guys to integrate their great service with WidSets, so that you can get the great stuff you are using in the Netvibes Ecosystem to your mobile, using WidSets.

Just go to the Netvibes Ecosystem page, choose "Feeds", and you will see the familiar WidSets logo next the feeds. Then click on the logo to get what you have selected, to your mobile, on WidSets.

There is also a Netvibes news widget in the Library, which you can start using.

This is just the first step, but pretty, cool, right?

Properazzi and WidSets collaboration

We worked together with Properazzi to create a mobile watch service, so that people can find their dream homes anywhere in Europe. With the Properazzi widget people receive matching results to their mobile, whenever suitable properties appear on the market. See the Press Release.

When you go to the Properazzi site, do a search for your dream home.

On the left hand side of the results you will see a WidSets logo.

When you click on that logo you get a little more information about how the get the Properazzi widget to your mobuile phone, which will be updated with matching results, whenever available.

Or as the Properazzi guys say "Properazzi property watch on your mobile".

Simple!

Text-TV on your mobile

We have worked together with the Finnish Broadcasting Company (Yle) in order to provide their great services through our widgets, directly on your phone.

Let's start with the Yle Teksti-TV widget, which works exactly as your TV's remote in your home, where you browse through the information pages on your TV. The only difference is that here you'll use the keypad of your mobile phone to type in the number of the pages you are interested in, and you'll get the information to your mobile phone display.

Check the Options of the widget to optimize the experience for you, by jumping to the pages you want to, by tuning in the view size so that it fits your phone display, etc.

And in case all people out there doesn't live in Finland :-) there is also a BBC Ceefax Teletext widget available, which has the same functionality as the previously mentioned widget, but in English.

We've been using these a lot during our internal testing period, so hopefully you'll enjoy these a lot, too!

Newsvine - the community way

I'd like to introduce you to a great site for not only reading news, but also for interacting with it by voting, commenting, and taking part of conversations. It's called Newsvine. I met with Mike and his guys during one of my early world tours :-) when I had a stopover in Seattle - a city I happen to like a lot, BTW - and loved the concept of Newsvine. The have some cool tools there, too.

The Newsvine widset is very easy to use. Just use the pull-down menu to select the news you are interested in. Or add a tag to the widset. Whichever you choose, you'll get updates on that to your mobile, automatically.

And as always, use the Bookmark and Email/Share features (Options/Send) for optimizing the reading and WOM experience!

WikiPedia

As everybody out there, I love WikiPedia and I use it really a lot. That's why I'm extremely excited to see that we now have a widset for that!

Using WikiPedia on the mobile is very simple, just type what you are interested in knowing more about, and press "Go". As long as WikiPedia knows the answer, you'll have it in your handset.

If you are using a low-end phone, or you are concerned about your phone bill, you may want to turn the "Show images" option to "No" from the widset options.

Enjoy!

Zvents - find local events fast

We're starting a series about widsets that we have created together with people running some interesting services. Let's start with our friends at Zvents. They have a lot of things going on, so check their site and blog for much more details!

Zvents is a great service where you can look for events in specific areas, but you can also add events and venues, as well as create groups.

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The Zvents widset is really nice. You can customize your widset to show whatever events you are interested in, anywhere in the San Francisco Bay Area or Seattle. There are also some defaults and examples in the widset menu on the web (click on pic to enlarge).

And don't forget that you can change that information on you mobile, too! Just move the cursor to the Zvents widset and click Options/Options (yes, we will fix that...), and continue from that menu. Suddenly you have a familiar menu in front of you, where you can specify the information you want.

As a bonus you can add a specific ringing tone, called an Alert, so that you can hear when there's some new content in the widset.