Cross Domain AJAX Calls and Iframe Communication How To

I set out to write a short tutorial about cross domain ajax calls and communication between iframes using url hashes (fragments), but I found this great tutorial by Michael Mahemoff covering the subject inside and out.

It is important to note that the code on his demo uses window.location.hash, although it seems this practice should currently be avoided because of a known open bugs in the way Firefox URI-decodes document.location.hash when getting its value (could be considered an expected behavior and not a bug, but still different than any other browser). Facebook’s code uses substring on pathname, and it seems to work cross browser. Facebook also have on their wiki a nice visual explanation of how it works:

Until the HTML 5 postMessage is widely adopted, we will have to keep using this somewhat of a hack, but it works, that’s what’s important.

Widgetbox Missing Out: Blidgets Should Be Aimed At Developers, Not Users

Widgetbox is an amazing service with a great promise: You might have content that can be widgetized and distributed, but there are numerous formats your widget can be in, and tons of services which it can be distributed on. Widgetbox is a centralized place to handle all that is widget, and it connects your content with several distribution methods (to all major blogging platforms, to social networks like MySpace, Facebook and Bebo, and to personalized homepages like iGoogle and Netvibes, and the list goes on). On top of that, it also helps your content get viral distribution.

Sounds like widget heaven, however in reality it is far from perfect. As it seems from toying around with Widgetbox, their delivery is below their promise — sometimes because of limitations imposed on them by 3rd parties, but sometimes because of what seems like misunderstanding of developer’s needs (or at least my needs 😉 ).

I set out to turn some RSS feeds, or some other API-available content, to be widgetized and distributed on social networks. I encountered two major issues that prevented me from succeeding.

The first issue is their support for distribution over MySpace and Facebook, or lack thereof. Widgets can be distributed on MySpace or Facebook only if they are flash widgets. If distributed on MySpace, outgoing links don’t work, and Widgetbox use some sort of weird workaround that makes the user copy and paste the link in a different browser tab (will you ever do it if a widget asks you to?). Moreover, it seems that there was an option to turn your widget to a Facebook App, but it has been down for the last 6 months.

The second issue is more important in my opinion, because it is entirely up to them and not imposed on them due to restrictions made by 3rd parties, and it reflects a flaw in their business perception. They have a great tool which is called a Blidget — a widget that takes an RSS feed and turns it into a slick flash widget showing the recent items in the feed. The main problem with it, is that it is aimed towards end users, and not towards developers. Say I have a web service with hundreds of thousands of users, each of them having his own RSS feed, and I want to enable them to get my branded widget with their feed in it with a click of a button — I can’t make use of Blidgets. Blidgets require the user to prepare them and brand them, there is no API for that which developers can use, nor is there anyway that I can prepare a branded Blidget, and pass the feed URL as a parameter, because a Blidget is made on a per-feed basis.

I consulted their support, that’s what they had to say:

It seems all you would have to do is get the RSS feed from them and make the widget yourself. You can put any brand or logo on the widget.

And when I said that I am looking for a scalable solution, not something that I have to manually do myself:

One link is not possible. You can have a link to Widgetbox.com on your site. Then you can list there RSS feed for them to copy and paste into widgetbox to create there blidget.

Which is unacceptable as well, since if they create the blidget, it’s not branded as I want it.

I think that Widgetbox is missing out here big time, at least in the Blidget case. Instead of leveraging the communities of existing web services and the innovation of developers (they try to do it with their other widget formats, I don’t understand why that’s not the case with Blidgets), they are turning to end users in search of virality. I believe that turning to developers and enabling them to use Blidgets, will increase the use cases and the virality of Blidgets. After all, getting a million users is harder than getting 10 developers, each with a tenth of a million users on his web service.