I was lucky enough to get a seat at London’s 2008 WidgetWebExpo chaired by Ivan pope. The event was held in “sunny” London and there were a range of speakers; Chris Thorpe (MySpace), Eyal Magen (Gigya) and Paul Smith (Umee) to name a few.

Of course I attended to explore the possibilities of widgets and SEO but found myself with a wealth of widget knowledge instead. Some really interesting facts and figures which may surprise a lot of you, but here’s a summary of some data:

•    The number 1 widget in the world (installs) = YouTube
•    The number 1 MySpace comment = “Thanks for the add”
•    Facebook “gifts” application made $30 million last year alone
•    The average widget only lasts 200 page views
•    Every human can only hold 150 meaningful relationships at once, the rest are lightweight
•    Each widget has a maximum lifespan of 6 weeks
•    For every widget install you should expect a maximum of 50 unique visitors

I also copied down some internal Gigya data to show the most common uses for widgets:

Anyway, I learned a lot more than what was written down on this post, but of course you have to hold back something for yourself! Thanks to all the guys that took part and I look forward to the next one!

1. The most recent change in Stumbleupon are the thumbnails of the sites that have been reviewed or stumbled. Previously they were screen shots of the entire page, which I had personally started to get use to, now the system is taking a snapshot of the main image on the page – this will now require more thought to attract attention.

2. Not too long ago there was quite a lot of fuss about a Stumbleupon user who got banned by posting threatening messages on other user’s walls. I think every SEO has probably come across these trolls before, the feature called “Flag this” now allows you to give a positive or negative rating to a users review. I have used this in both a positive and negative way but am yet to see any real positive responses.

3. Flickr given special treatment – when you come across a Flickr stumble in the future look on the right of the screen where the user whom discovered the page’s information will be. You will see the addition of “Stumble Thru Flickr.com” under “Share this with a friend”. In all honestly I’m not sure if this is new but I certainly haven’t noticed before.

4. Previously you could block users entirely in Stumbleupon if they were rude or for whatever other reason. If you look at your friends page and look at the bottom right of the page then you will notice a box where you can “unblock” blocked users, not entirely sure why you would want to do this but there you go. Also above that box you can search for friends by email address too, I was not aware of this either!

5. If you scroll down to the bottom of any Stumbleupon page you will see a link labelled “Directory” – if you click on this it will produce a list of alphabetic letters. From this you can find every member of StumbleUpon. If you look down the list you see that there is a small box to the left of your name, some are white, some have bits of blue, some have complete blue and some have complete green. I have looked through this and I can only determine this to be your Stumbleupon rank – Green being a power user or activity on Stumbleupon. Another thought is that the green represents being online, and the blue is based on reputation, I came to this assumption by looking at the number of pages liked, reviews etc. If anyone has any additional information on this I will update the post if it can be backed up.

And before people start saying “They’re not secret!” not everyone knows as much as you! Some people are beginners!

EDIT – I had some feedback from Howardtheduck on SU: 

You are right in #5 , Blue fills up as you get “fans” It turns all green if you become a “sponsor”. See, they are all green :

http://www.stumbleupon.com/stumblethru.php