When I started working at the community innovation center of AmpmInsure (only with my requirements and few technical advices), I started learning some hard facts about these syndication widgets. Let me try to put 5 points that I have learned about these syndication widgets:
- Fast – The tools should deliver fast on your server. The tools embed on your pages should not make your existing pages slow. I saw the community people at AmpmInsure really techy to address these queries. As per evan, “We are delivering the plain JS and nothing can be faster than that. A simple small JS file, no database operations, no server side scripting, just plain and simple JSâ€.
- Graceful failure – When the syndication tool fails it should appear as if it never had syndicated such a tool. More details at http://evan.ampminsure.org/2006/08/13/graceful-failure/
- Widget analytics – http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2006/08/widget_analytic.html , which will allow the webmaster to see what is going on with the tools.
- Overall feedbacks – Let the people put the real feedback for others to read, right with the tools. How many sites are using it? What do they feel about it?
- Customization – There should be an option to customize the overall tool as per the site.
Thanks for the great info