We've just finished rolling out the most recent update to yourminis.com.  The core component of this release centers around improvements to the widget reports.  Specifically, some of the changes and updates include:

* 1 Year of Data: Previously we only displayed the most recent 120 days of activity for each widget.  With this release, you can review the activity for each widget on a rolling one year basis, giving you a much longer window of time to analyze the health and growth of your widget.

* New Annotated Time Line: This new control is at the center of the reporting interface.  The time line shows the trend for your widget for the past 30 days - by default.  You can easily click on other pre-selected time intervals such as 7 days, 3 month or even one year.  With each interval that you select, you'll be able to drill down into a more granular view.  For example when looking at a 1 month zoom,you'll be able to drill down into each week for that month.  You can also scroll the time line by dragging the chart to the left or right, allowing you greater interactivity with your data.  Although we're not exposing true annotations at this time, in the future you'll be able to add in your own annotations to denote things such as the start or end of a campaign, a particular promotion, etc.

* New Sparklines: Within the Summary Screen, we've maintained the visual display of the data that you've told us is important to you, such as views, interactions, copies and users.  In addition, we've inserted sparklines which graphically depict the daily trends for whatever category and period of time you're viewing, alongside the high (green) and low (red) values.

* New Charts: We have replaced all of our older charts with newer visualization components.  We think that the new interface is much more vibrant and helps to make the data stand out more.  In addition, we present all of the pertinent data on one screen so that you are no longer forced to click into each sub-category.  This should allow you to quickly get whatever information you're interested in.
* Tooltips: We've layered in a slew of icons which should hopefully answer whatever questions you might have.  If you hover over these icons, you'll see inline help appear, giving you definitions for the data you're viewing.

As always, in addition to these core changes, we've continued to tighten up the system and fix whatever issues our users and partners are bubbling up to us. 

Please let us know what you think of the updated reporting screens.  We're eager to hear your feedback.  In the meantime, we're now going to be working on an improved dashboard which will give you a simpler view into the health and growth of your widgets overall.  Stay tuned for more great updates...

Just in time for the holidays, we managed to push out one more product release, with some nice functionality for the social containers.

To start with, we've enhanced our support for fully custom canvas pages.  In addition to supporting iGoogle and Myspace, we now also support Bebo and Facebook with all of the same functionality that was previously mentioned with our previous release.

We've also made it possible to use third party Flash AS3 libraries for Facebook (such as as3facebooklib) to fully access Facebook functionality from your widget application without us getting in the way.  We've made this possible by bubbling up all of the fb_sig variables that we have access to from within the scope of the application - to access the specific variable that you're interested, just call widget.social.getParameter().

We've also updated our Terms of Service.  Please read through the TOS and be sure that you agree to them in order to continue using the yourminis platform.

Thanks for your continued support.  Happy Holidays!

We pushed out our most recent product release a couple of days ago on December 5th.  This most recent release has numerous small improvements and bug fixes and also adds a few pieces of new functionality.

The largest new piece of functionality is our support for the iGoogle and MySpace canvas pages.  This support allows you to add in whatever content you wish (HTML/CSS/JavaScript) into the canvas page, allowing for a richer overall experience when users maximize their widgets in iGoogle or view them on the canvas page within MySpace.  We're hoping that this gives you the flexibility you need to drive more interactive experiences, and based on your feedback, we are planning on creating similar functionality for Facebook and our other supported locations.  You can access the canvas page editor within the galleries section of the dashboard.

Also in the gallery section, you may notice that we have added settings for Facebook to disable the display of the "edit settings" screen and the gallery tab.  Both of these are now disabled by default, and there is no need to add these settings in as part of the callback URL.

Finally, we've also revamped the publish settings screen to make it a bit more clean and straightforward looking, hopefully making it easier for everyone to make changes to their widget settings.  In addition, we've added two new fields - one for author and one for email address.  These two fields are populate from the account screen for the logged in user and they are then used to populate the iGoogle gallery settings.  In the future, these settings may be used to populate other galleries as well, so you should make sure that you are publishing the widget as the "proper" user and that the account settings for that user are properly set.

As always, please let us know if you see any issues with the release and/or if you have any comments for us.

We're sorry to inform you that as of October 27, 2008, we will no longer support the yourminis startpage.  You already know that one of the best things about widgets is their ability to give you access to the content and features you value from different locations across the Web.   Because there are already so many great startpage solutions out there supporting yourminis (like myAOL, iGoogle or Netvibes), we've decided to let the startpage experts take care of the startpages, so we could focus on what we do best -- building widgets.

The startpage link will be removed from the site shortly, and the startpage itself will be completely removed on October 27, 2008, so please make sure to export all of your content from the site prior to this date.  Although we know that this is an inconvenience, you can export your feeds data as an OPML file, take most of your content, and import it into other startpage solutions (see instructions below). yourminis widgets will continue to work on other sites as they have in the past. 

We're also going to be making some changes to the gallery.  The details page for each widget will still exist, but we will be removing browsing, favoriting, and statistics functionality from the consumer gallery.

To export your feeds data to another startpage:
1.) Simply click "Add Content" at the upper left hand side of the yourminis startpage.
2.) Click "Export OPML" at the bottom of the menu and save the OPML file to your desktop.
3.) Go to your favorite startpage and follow their instructions for importing the OPML file that you exported in step #2.

We appreciate your patience and understanding as we make these changes.  If you have any further questions, please feel free to comment below.

In our latest update to the yourminis widget platform, we've added support for the myAOL startpage in two ways.  First, all widgets now have the "Copy to myAOL" icon available on the syndication panel.  Clicking this will allow a user to add the widget to their myAOL page.  Second, we've added myAOL as an available gallery option, allowing you the administrative ability to submit your widget to the myAOL gallery for additional distribution opportunity.

In addition, we've continued to enhance our Facebook support. You'll notice that the "add application" to Facebook workflow has been revamped, making it significantly easier to convert your widgets into Facebook Applications.  From the frontend perspective, we now display images in the profile view and direct users to the canvas page to interact with the widget, ultimately resulting in a better user experience for most of our existing widgets.  The new Facebook interface introduced a maximum size restriction of 180x250 for the display of a widget within the left rail of a user's profile page.  Most widgets are built to a standard size of 300x250 and thus will not work well within the new limited space. You can customize the image to be displayed within this space via the Settings>Manage Thumbnails section of your dashboard.Finally, we've implemented the Facebook template bundles and associated publishUserAction() API call.  This allows you to register a feed template bundle and then leverage it within the API to message actions within the widget to the user's activity feed.

We are very excited with our latest platform update which made significant improvements to our syndication support.  This release improved the "Copy to Facebook" workflow considerably. Adding a widget to your Facebook profile is now only two clicks away. We also included an  "Add to profile" button to allow you to add the widget to your profile page or your boxes tab in just one step. 

With this release, we have also have made it possible for users to access the syndication panel for smaller widgets (badges), regardless of their copy destination.

We also have made the subject line in the Send To A Friend syndication option editable.
 
In addition to these significant improvements, we've also made the following changes/fixes to the platform:

• Copying widgets to Live.com has been restored. However, we are still investigating an issue with posting a widget to the Live.com Gallery.
• We have increased the character limits to 128 characters for the title field that can be found within our Content Management System (CMS) available via the dashboard.  We also added error messaging for exceeding the character limit.

As always, your feedback is always welcome

This latest release had a focus on creating default applications for both Bebo and Facebook.  This means that any widget published to our platform will automatically be available as both a Bebo and Facebook application - without any additional configuration on your part.  In actuality, the newly created widget would be added to our default applications, allowing users to engage with the widget alongside other widgets that are part of our default application.  For apps that need their own identity or need to leverage social features, you still have the ability to spend a little more time and configure Bebo and/or Facebook to support your newly created widget.

We've added the ability to more effectively "share" Facebook applications with other users.  If you are accessing an application, you can click "share" which will take you to the canvas page and make it possible for you to select friends that you want to share the application with.  This helps to drive the viral effect of the applications.

For additional flexibility within the custom "send to friend" template, we've added the ability to parse out individual FlashVar values so that they can be printed in the email or used to generate URLs.  In addition, the image URL now displays the image of the widget with it's FlashVars set - allowing you to send a very specific representation of the actual widgets rather than the default screenshot.

We've also implemented to backend changes which will improve performance.  The first separates our tracking calls from the calculation that's done for our reports.  This allows each system to function much more fluidly. The second change leverages our CDN to cache our proxy.api calls, ensuring that the response time is faster and we have less load on our servers.

Our last update centered around adding support for Bebo Applications, but the focus of this release was the support of MySpace applications.  Creating a MySpace Application is even easier than the process for creating a Facebook or Bebo App.  Most of the work is handled by copying a URL string from the yourminis Dashboard to the MySpace App creation system, and we take care of generating the appropriate XML for you - just make sure that the widget is setup properly in the dashboard (title, description, tags, etc.) before submitting the URL to MySpace.  Converting your widget to a MySpace application is a great idea as it will make it easier for your user to copy the widget to their pages (no more CAPTCHA) and the Flash restriction (such as not being able to link out of a Flash widget) will be lifted.

In the interim, widgets that are not converted to MySpace applications will continue to work as they have in the past, but we're also working on a master MySpace application which will enable all yourminis widgets to function as though they were apps - without any additional work from you.

With this release, we've also made some significant strides with our developer site.  We've tried to simplify the site, making it easier than ever before to find the information that you're looking for, we've exposed more sample code allowing you to dig in and really get a feel for what's possible, and we've added additional commentary around our API with the goal of making our system as clear as possible.  We know we're not quite perfect yet, so we welcome your involvement and your feedback.  To facilitate the feedback, we've launched a developer blog and we've launched a developer network - we really want to hear from you!

In addition to these significant improvements, we've also made the following changes/fixes to the platform:

• We've removed Piczo and Xanga from the syndication panel.  Although they're great networks in their own right, our users simply didn't copy widgets to those sites, and after conducting some usability testing, we realized that less is sometimes more.  Over the next few months, we will look to clean up our syndication panel further, highlighting the areas where users tend to gravitate towards.
• We've updated our instructions for posting to the Facebook gallery, making it easier to get through the process without making mistakes, and we've implemented a way to disable some of the instructions that we were presenting on the canvas page, as they weren't always relevant to the widget
• We've implemented a solution whereby we clear the content cache whenever a widget is published, ensuring that changes are visible to end user within an hour or so of the update to your widget.

And as always, we've made other bug fixes and implemented additional back end functionality which isn't readily apparent just yet.  In our next update, the focus will be on our reporting functionality, with a goal of simplifying the reports while surfacing more relevant and important information.  As always, we're looking forward to your feedback...

We've just updated production with our most recent platform improvements.  Chief among these improvements is our support for the Bebo platform.  We've added in two integration points.  First, we've made it possible to implement any widget as a Bebo application.  To do this, click on your widget from within the dashboard, the click galleries, and go through the "Post to Bebo" process.  Second, once the application is available within Bebo, you'll notice that the actual widget will have a Bebo button on the copy panel.  If you click the Bebo button, you will be brought to the application page and you'll be able to add the application to your profile.  In addition to the Bebo integration, we've made the following changes:

1. We've made a modification to enable the start page to work with Firefox 3 on Windows.
2. We've fixed an issue with posting our widgets to the iGoogle directory.
   
3. We've made significant improvements to the UI and querying
   performance of our analytics system, ensure that critical queries are
   returned extremely quickly
4. We've enabled the "remix" functionality from within the yourminis dashboard

And we've made a number of improvements and bug fixes to individual widgets and to the platform overall.  Let us know your thoughts, on the Bebo integration and on anything else you see in the platform...

This latest release is a big one for developers.  We've revamped the developer site, starting with a redesign of the overall site navigation, making it cleaner and easier - you should definitely be able to find whatever it is that you're looking for.  We've also updated the tutorials and have included copy/print sample code with line numbers.  And for you Flex developers out there, we now fully support Flex widgets, along with native AS2 and AS3.  Finally, we've put together an integrated online widget test console that allows you to write, debug and test your AS3/Flex widget code without having to have any development software on your own machine!

In addition to the developer goodies, we've added support for the Yahoo Widget platform as another syndication site.  You can now add any of our widgets to your Yahoo Widget application.  Just click the "Yahoo Widgets" icon in the copy panel:

As always, we're looking forward to hearing your comments in our forums.