MajikWidget aims to help everyday bloggers by providing little widgets they can choose to integrate to blog posts. Currently in private beta, although they’re accepting new signups fairly quickly, they have three widgets in place — a rating meter, a polling system, and an 'open-all-links-in-a-new-window' hack. To use a widget, all you need to do is basically customize a few settings if needed, get it to generate the code and then post the code (usually an iFrame) to your blog, within your post, or whatever.
Their revenue model is based on credits — you can choose to get 25 free credits when you signup or buy 500 credits for $25, and so on. Each credit is basically worth one use of a widget, for example if making a poll would cost me one credit. For most bloggers, 25 credits should last long enough — and as for the 500 credits, I think we'll be in Web 5.9 when someone actually uses up all of them. 😉
While I do like the idea of MajikWidget, I think it's been tried too many times before in the 1.0 era — something like Bravenet or Free-CGI comes to mind. What has changed of course is that there is now a much more specific use for this service and it now actually has a focused audience — bloggers — where as back then it was just trying out new things to see if people actually use these them, and without MySpace or blogs around at that time, it's obvious what the outcome looked like. In any case it'll be interesting to see how it's perceived through the bloggers.
For now they're working on a few more handy widgets which they plan to launch soon and you can even help them out by suggesting ideas — and if you're idea goes well like Guy Kawasaki's polling idea did, they'll incorporate you into their Linkware system where every use of your idea potentially gets a link-back to your blog.
About the author: Sid Yadav is a Web 2.0 evangelist, consultant, and blogger who occasionally contributes to devlounge in this category. Sid lives in Queenstown, New Zealand, and currently consults for new and forming Web 2.0 startups and also authors rev2.org, where he posts frequent reviews and writeups on new Web 2.0 startups, tools and services, as well as essays and writeups on the emering era of new web technologies.
