Something I’ve been increasingly fascinated with over the last year is the reuse of free internet services that I have. On my site, I have widgets that feed the last 4 posts from this wordpress blog, and my twitter feed. I also have an ajax live bing search box that will return results from my site, or the web in general. Most recently, I setup my default page to show a random image from a set I have on flickr.
Separately, over on linkedin, any blog posts that I tag “linkedin” show up. And I have a google docs presentation integrated into my profile. All of these integrations were free, and pretty easy to do. Many of them involved copy and paste html. A few involved calling api’s, but they were easy to use and well documented.
And I haven’t touched the tip of the iceberg. Last.fm, Delicious, google calendar, and more all provide feeds and widgets that I’m not yet taking advantage of. And there are creative ways to use these differently than intended.
It’s easy to write a twitter widget, that doesn’t appear to be twitter. Drop it on a client’s site, and they can add news blurbs via twitter or sms. It’s a small piece of content management that couldn’t be easier to integrate.