Over the past week I’ve gotten into widget development in a big way. For those of you not as geeky as me, widgets are mini-applications that you can copy and past into web pages. Widgets make all sorts of content and information portable. If this sort of thing interests you I recommend that you head over to Widgetbox and browse their gallery of widgets.

I produce a podcast about the New York Mets and also manage a companion social network. I’ve been thinking of different ways to make the content more portable and more social so I can continue to build my audience and community. I remembered Widgetbox from earlier adventures and decided to see what I could do with the platform. The short answer is this. You can do a lot with the Widgetbox platform.

Creating a customizable, embeddable widget from a blog is as simple as entering an RSS feed and filling out a few simple fields to indicate the title, description, sizing and colors. The widget below took me five minutes to create. Click here to see it if you’re reading in an RSS reader.

Cross site compatibility is one of the great features of the platform. When someone clicks that Get Widget button they can choose from embed codes that will work on Facebook, MySpace, WordPress, Netvibes, iGoogle, Ning and many other popular websites. This is in addition to being able to paste into any site that will accept javascript or flash codes.

With Widgetbox you can go beyond just adding a blog RSS feed. I host my own flash audio player for my Mets podcast and have wanted to make it available for embedding everywhere. Widgetbox lets you do that. You can pass their interface flash embed codes, html or javascript, a web page or iGoogle gadget urls to make them into widgets.

In my case I passed in the embed code for my Amazin Moments Podcast Player. The interface then allowed me to adjust a few settings and make the player available as a flash or javascript embed. See the player below or click here.

Widgetbox also offers the option to help you turn your widget into a Facebook application. I decided to take them up on the offer and try it out. Their Facebook application wizard walks you through the process step-by-step, presenting the Facebook developer pages in an iFrame on the Widgetbox website. The process requires a bit of concentration but is definitely doable if you follow directions closely.

It took me about twenty minutes to complete my Amazin Moments Podcast Player on Facebook. Now anyone on Facebook can easily add my player to one of their pages. Facebook is a new promotion platform for me and it makes it much easier to be able to have the application as a tool for that promotion. It’s also important to note that no coding was required in order to create the application.

I’ve become a fast fan of this platform and am already plotting my next few widgets. You can go here to see the widgets I’ve created so far. I think the best way to get a feel for the system is to create an account and try making a few widgets yourself. It’s easy and it’s fun. If you try it out come on back and leave a comment about your thoughts on the Widgetbox platform.