Adaptive Blue Launches New Display Widgets

Smart browsing company Adaptive Blue just launched a few new widgets to complement their existing distributed tools.

The newest round of widgets leverage RSS feeds from popular services such as Amazon and Epicurious to display dynamically updated lists of popular items like Amazon products or Netflix most popular. You can also set up more personalized widgets of your Amazon wishlist or Netflix Queue.

While these are nice looking widgets, there’s nothing too revolutionary in the widget itself. Folks have long been able to plug RSS feeds into services like Widgetbox or Musestorm to create their own display widgets of whatever dynamic content might complement their blog.

Dig a little deeper, however, and you can see what Adapative Blue is up to here. These display widgets are a slick delivery vehicle for their SmartLinks. Each widget comes equipped with a button corresponding to each item (e.g. a movie title), which triggers Adaptive Blue’s signature SmartLinks module which points to resources around the Web related to that particular item. The resources might include the movie’s Wikipedia page, its review pages on the New York Times and Flixster, and places to buy the DVD.

The default setting on these widgets allow for Adaptive Blue to earn affiliate fees from purchases driven by their Smartlinks. However, widget publishers are able to override these default settings and plug in their own Amazon Associate IDs and earn 100% of the resulting affiliate commissions.

While I believe the days when simple display widgets could drive massive distribution to be far behind us, there’s no reason for Adaptive Blue not to experiment with different ways to push out its Smart Links.

I believe Adaptive Blue's biggest challenge as a company is that they are pushing a new behavior that may not be easily grasped by non geeks. The more things that they can do to wrap their service in simple, understandable contexts, the better. These sorts of widgets are a nice step in that direction.

Click through to grab your own Popular SmartLink widget.