Both Netvibes and myAOL have been great partners to us throughout the years.  Now that we are closing our own startpage, both groups have put together blog posts to welcome yourminis startpage users - complete with instructions as to how to import your OMPL files to their systems.  Please take a look at the Netvibes post and at the myAOL post for more information.  You will see that both groups have terrific startpages, and we encourage you to take them for a spin. 

yourminis has been nominated as a finalist for The Industry Standard Innovation 100 Awards!

After receiving hundreds of nominations from their community, yourminis distinguished itself as an innovation leader in the widget category. Now that we've reached the voting stage, we need your help. The more votes we get, the more likely we'll become a winner in our category. Voting will run from now through October 3, 2008. The voting takes place here: http://www.thestandard.com/awards/tis100/show_category/5744

Thanks for helping us get this far and for your continued support!

As part of our initiative to engage more users with our API we are redesigning the "Developers" section of our website.  We hope to make it easier for newcomers to understand our API, as well as empower existing users with additional resources.  Some ideas we are considering include:

• A blog aimed specifically at developers
• Simpler website design, with possible migration to a familiar platform (such as incorporation of Google Groups)
• A larger set of tutorials and samples to learn from, with better documentation
• A set of standard components to reduce development time
• General improvements to our platform regarding performance and ease of use
• More direct community interaction, including contests for developers and special recognition

We would also love to hear any ideas you have, or other feedback as well!

Alex and I are heading up to Web 2.0 Expo later tonight.  We're looking forward to some great sessions, getting together with folks that we haven't seen for a while and meeting some new people as well.  If you're going to be at Web 2.0 Expo, drop one of us a line and we'll see if we can get together.  All that said, the thing we're looking forward to the most is a session titled "Widgets Growing Up".  Alex will be the moderator for the event and I will be one of the panelists, along with some other terrific widget experts:  Tariq Krim (NetVibes), Hooman Radfar (Clearspring Technologies, Inc.), Rooly Eliezerov (Gigya Inc.) and Ganesh Sivaraman (Nokia, Inc.) - make sure to catch this session at 11am on Friday 4/25.

Alex and I spent some time talking with Robert Scoble recently.  Check out the PodTech show below:

Once you've taken a look at the interview, make sure to check out my demo of both the consumer facing side of yourminis.com as well as the enterprise dashboard:

Many of you have probably seen a couple of new widgets in our community created by "bestweekever". 

We're proud to say that two of these widgets now live on the Best Week Ever site - http://www.bestweekever.tv/ - and are displayed here as well:

If you visit their site, you'll be able to see the ticker at the top of the screen, along with their posts widget in the right hand side.  If you click on "widgets", you'll be brought to startpage like environment, giving you the ability to interact with multiple widgets.

Thanks to the popularity of the site, we can see that these two widgets will quickly become our most popular ones as well! 

Stay tuned for more widgets from our partners in the near future.  And as always, please share your thoughts with us!

Twiistup is an exciting new event that will showcase some of the best and brightest tech talent in Southern California (including yourminis :). Twiistup's goal is to allow start-ups to showcase their ideas and create a friendly atmosphere where guests can network with fellow innovators, investors, job seekers, and established industry leaders.

The event will take place on May 9th, from 7pm - midnight at Zanzibar in Santa Monica, CA.

To find out more about the event check out the twiistup site @ http://www.twiistup.com.

Come say hi - we would love to see you there.

One of our superstar developers, Hart Woolery, recently presented at an ApolloCamp.  He did a terrific job of taking the audience through an overview of the yourminis.com site, adding widgets to the desktop leveraging the power of Apollo, and even showed off our API functionality.  The video is a bit long, but it's a must see if you're interesting in yourminis. 

The folks over at Mashable are asking people to vote for their favorite startpage.  If you're reading this blog, we can only hope that your favorite is yourminis!

To vote, click on the Social Networking banner, scroll down to the comments section and enter "vote=yourminis".

Thanks for your support!

Our friends over at MacOSX86.net, have put together a screencast highlighting the usability and functionality of yourminis.com.  The screencast goes into a good deal of detail, highlighting various minis (calendar, clock, RSS, GMail, Weather, etc.), the creation of tabs (changing backgrounds, moving minis from one tab to another, etc.), multiple tab view and more!

Take a look at the screencast, but please be aware that the voice over is in French.