Gigya’s “embed this” widget is a simple tabbed menu of social sites that lets anyone post your embed code to their page by just entering their credentials. It even works with Facebook applications. You can see the full list of partners here.

It’s a distinctly different strategy than what other widget tool startups are doing. We reported on another company, ClearSpring, which similarly helped developers track and spread their application. However, in contrast to Gigya, ClearSpring is open to any developer and focuses on widgetizing content, not easily posting them to social sites. Gigya is aimed at enabling large widget publishers low friction adoption on social sites.

Gigya recently closed a round of funding with Benchmark and First Round Capital $2.4 million on June 25th.

Sphere It

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 10th, 2007 at 4:15 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)Comments
RSS feed for comments on this post.

Derek Anderson

July 10th, 2007 at 6:10 pm

A fantastic idea. Making a widget more viral is the key to success. Obviously the widget has to be desirable as well. But it definitely has to be viral and what better way than through another widget such as this!

Ty Graham

July 10th, 2007 at 6:11 pm

I love the name, just take out the y

Chisa

July 10th, 2007 at 6:41 pm

Gigya hasn’t gotten a particularly good response on Gaia so far – for a while it was creating a popup on every page, and now there are concerns about privacy and what they will do with stored account details of the partnered sites. I guess that’s a risk you have to take with these widgets though…

Rich.List

July 10th, 2007 at 7:04 pm

It’s convenient, but just as Chisa said, privacy problem is the big barrier to sucess!

Eyal

July 10th, 2007 at 7:11 pm

This is Eyal from Gigya. Just to remark on Chisa comment, Gigya’s privacy policy is the strictest possible. We will never share/sell account details to anyone or use them in any way other than the one intended by the user.

Like Gaia, we are backed by Benchmark capital, a fact that helps ensure our partners we have the proper policies in place.

Re the technical remark, this might have been an integration issue as we obviously do not open any pop ups. We would be happy to work with Gaia to get this done right.

David Mackey

July 10th, 2007 at 7:49 pm

Very nice. Should reduce development time.

Chisa

July 10th, 2007 at 9:29 pm

Eyal – thanks for the response, its good to see I’ll admit that I don’t know much about privacy laws and policies so I can’t say much on that myself; I’m just generally wary of any place that asks for my passwords for anything.

I’ve heard that Gaia’s developers are working with Gigya on a solution already, so hopefully that will be sorted out soon.

Passwords are a bit of a sore subject on Gaia – as a site with virtual items and currency, we get a lot of phishing, ‘hacking’ and scamming of passwords going on and get reminded often by Gaia’s staff members not to give out our Gaia password to anyone. That’s why this is seen as a bit confusing to newer and more naive users, I think.

Man From Nantucket

July 11th, 2007 at 4:28 am

That list is not the -complete- list of partners !
We use gigya wildfire on gruvr.com and it seems to be working well.

Yes there is some kind of popup bug but they are working out the kinks.
I like the fact that they are small and the top people respond directly.
One thing wildfire needs is some way to monitor the ‘infection’ rate – how many people repost your widgets, exclusive of robot pageviews?

Concrete Stain

July 11th, 2007 at 6:56 am

This would be a google company for google to purchase – and integrate into a Widget analytics.

Eyal

July 12th, 2007 at 4:08 am

Thanks “Man from Nantucket” We are releasing in a week or two exactly what you requested – a version of our distribution tool that would go into Flash widgets and will track across “widget generations”. You will get the information on one of our next partner newsletters.

bob cobb

July 12th, 2007 at 5:29 am

I just started using widgetbox for my site, does gigya do anything that they can’t?

Leave a Reply Continue the conversation

Yes there is some kind of popup bug but they are working out the kinks.
I like the fact that they are small and the top people respond directly.
One thing wildfire needs is some way to monitor the ‘infection’ rate – how many people repost your widgets, exclusive of robot pageviews?

I’ve heard that Gaia’s developers are working with Gigya on a solution already, so hopefully that will be sorted out soon.

Passwords are a bit of a sore subject on Gaia – as a site with virtual items and currency, we get a lot of phishing, ‘hacking’ and scamming of passwords going on and get reminded often by Gaia’s staff members not to give out our Gaia password to anyone. That’s why this is seen as a bit confusing to newer and more naive users, I think.

Like Gaia, we are backed by Benchmark capital, a fact that helps ensure our partners we have the proper policies in place.

Re the technical remark, this might have been an integration issue as we obviously do not open any pop ups. We would be happy to work with Gaia to get this done right.