For about six months, I've been trying to figure out how to create a plug-in that would associate any stream (such as Flickr, Ma.gnolia, and Twitter for example) with a given post, so that a post from a particular day in April 2008 would have photos and Tweets and links from that same day, or a user-determined close time frame.

The idea is to collect time-related objects, as one can easily do when hand-rolling a blog post in HTML, but as one presently cannot do with automated blogging software and social networking applications.

Imagine a blog post from five years ago that talks about your band, and is associated with Flickr photos of you and your band as you looked five years ago-not because you manually inserted the photos, but because time-linkage between web applications is possible.

Imagine a blog post from five years from now that talks about your wedding and is associated with Flickr photos of your wedding-not because you manually inserted the photos, but because time-linkage between web applications is possible.

Make everything portable. The next version of the Macintosh operating system, due out in October, has a small feature called Web Clip that turns any part of a site into a widget that lives on the consumer's desktop. This is a big sign of things to come.

In the very near future portals including iGoogle, My Yahoo and Netvibes as well as social networks will be able to easily inhale the smallest pieces of content from across the web. Don't wait. Start now to make everything on your website embeddable. Traffic is becoming something that happens elsewhere, not just on your site.

The expected change in approach is a reaction to the success of rival Facebook, which last month unveiled a similar step to open its network to outside developers. Although it has less than half as many users as MySpace in the US, Facebook's approach has won it strong backing from other consumer internet companies, which hope it will give them an easier way to reach the network's 27m members.

More than 1,000 applications and services are already available, letting users do things like publish slideshows of personal pictures to their Facebook pages, or add a box that keeps track of when their favourite bands are playing concerts nearby.

"The [Facebook] platform is interesting," Mr DeWolfe said in an interview with the Financial Times. He argued MySpace's current technology approach gave its users many of the same benefits but said: "We'll probably offer users the choice of both."

The aim was to attract more online companies to create services for MySpace's users. "We'll be bringing in more developers."

1. Spam - If you think someone is spamming you, tag it out loud! Internally, we like to call a user who games the system a SchMOe (Social Media Optimizer). Tag anyone who spams you with the term schmoe. While they have the ability to delete the tag and never see it again, WE can see it internally. As their user account racks up the schmoe tag, we'll investigate their conversations and take appropriate action.

2. Hot Members - Let's allow the users of MyBlogLog to pick Hot Members! Every week I'll dig through the users who are frequently tagged a Hot Member and let you all know about one of them. User chosen Hot Members sounds so much cooler to me anyway.

MySpace will acquire Flektor, a just-launched service that allows users to create widgets from photos, video and text, according to two sources with knowledge of the deal. This comes right after the news of MySpace’s pending acquisition of Photobucket last week for $250-$300 million. This will be a much smaller deal, in the $10-$20 million range, possibly with an earnout.

Flektor competes with more established startups like Slide and RockYou, and launched only a few weeks ago. Still, insiders say that the company has developed a killer set of tools to create slide shows as well as much more elaborate widgets that include audio, video, photos, text, effects and transitions. In our testing v. Slide and RockYou, Flektor came out way ahead in usability and features.

It's an odd acquisition, though, since Photobucket also has a slide creation product that competes with Flektor.

Technorati already offers bloggers an array of widgets. They mostly are blog-content related, such as listing top searches, link counts, and tags. Now, the company seems to be considering introducing widgets that display ads.

Or so you'd gather from a survey I just received (as a consumer -- not a journalist) from Technorati.

Coincidentally, I had a long chat last night with Technorati co-founder Peter Hirschberg. He didn't breathe a word about anything widget-related.

Now he is about to blow it all apart. Within the next few weeks, all of those little boxes (Krim calls them "modules") will become exportable as widgets to other Websites as well. "I love destroying what I build," he says.

It's Krim's way of contributing to the budding widget economy. Netvibes has 10 million active users, If you figure that each one has created at least five modules per page, that's a lot of potential widgets. Krim declares:

"Widgets are killing the Webpage. It is time to go to something else. We are entering the widget economy. We are going there no matter what."

Netvibes is also developing a Universal Widget API that will let widgets talk to one another and synchronize among themselves. And in April, Krim plans to add social networking features to Netvibes, such as the ability to subscribe to your friends' widgets or send them a cool blog post or video directly to their Netvibes page.

The second piece of news almost fell under the radar. Netvibes rival Webwag has quietly enabled a feature that lets users post widgets from Netvibes and Google IG to a Webwag page. They want to keep it quiet until the feature is officially ready, but I love the idea. Once all the startpages support the same widgets, how do you choose between them?

There are many culprits. First, we have a lot of third party widgets, ads and analytics apps running on the site. They are often the cause for slow load times. FM Publishing, our advertising network, often slows down the site and then other things pile on to crush it.

Today we had three problems. FM is updating their software and caused massive . We switched to the new version of wordpress which is clearly not bug free. And on top of that we have a number of plugins that are acting weird on the new wordpress software. One of them took us down earlier tonight.

Another culprit is MyBlogLog, which we've had to strip off the site a number of times because of slowdowns.

On his Web log, Pastor Hyatt, the leader of the Evergreen Community in Portland, Ore., has woven in widgets, or mini-applications, that show a selection of book covers from his personal library, present the most recent posts from some of his favorite blogs, and serve up random quotes from the television show "Arrested Development."

"You start small, and it's kind of like an addiction," said Pastor Hyatt (his blog is at bobhyatt.typepad.com). "TypePad has a whole section of widgets, and they're adding more all the time," he continued, referring to a popular blog-hosting service.

According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, about 12 million Americans now maintain a blog. Widgets are elements, often in the left or right columns of a blog, that enhance its usefulness or aesthetic appeal. (The term "widgets," confusingly, can also refer to compact applications that operate on a computer's desktop.)

"Widgets pull content or services from some other place on the Web, and put it into your personal page," said Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist at Union Square Ventures in Manhattan.

The more important kind of widgets are those that let you take data from one Website and embed them into another. Sometimes these are called Web badges or snippets, but they let you remix the Web to your liking by adding, say, a customized search box to your blog, a YouTube video to your MySpace page, or create a whole page of widgets on NetVibes by pulling in your Gmail, favorite RSS feeds, and photos from around the Web. If you use TypePad, there is a whole gallery of widgets you can add to your blog, including your linkroll or a one-click video chatting button.

The reason Web widgets are important is because they are the most concrete manifestation of something else that is happening. The Web is splintering. Centralized portals don't matter anymore in an era when Google and Digg will filter the ever-changing Web for you much more efficiently. Or you can filter it yourself with a few well-chosen widgets, and bring it to your own particular corner of the Web.

Some are already calling 2007 the -year of the widget. But ever since Websites started opening up their innards a few years ago and giving away their data through open APIs any programmer could access, the widgetization of the Web was already on its way. Now, nearly anyone can grab a widget and slap it onto their blog, NetVibes or MySpace page.

Widget startups will spring up that not only disseminate information to an atomized Web, but use their widgets to gather information as well in order to recentralize and repackage it.

Their first offering is a horoscope widget that updates itself with content from theAstrologer.com. They’ve done a good job: it's nicely designed and you don't even need to cut and paste any code - you can instantly add it to MySpace by entering your MySpace username and password (this is a feature that we’re seeing more regularly).

In the case of MySpace, the ability to simply click "add" when you hear a song you like and then you are broadcasting that song on your own page was pure genius. It brought the musicians to MySpace because they saw the viral aspects to music on MySpace. The more musicians came to MySpace, the more value accrued to being a member of the MySpace social network.

The founders of YouTube must have thought a lot about that trick because when they made their video player embeddable on a MySpace page, the MySpace community reacted swiftly, putting YouTube videos on their pages the way they put music on their page. They find something they like and they show it to their friends. Not a link, that's old school, they showcase the media right their on their page.