I tripped on this amazing site a while back that allows normal folk to design totally portable social networking widgets. They can be published on several different social platforms [including Facebook] very easily.
Basically you sign up for the service and design your “Sprout”, use their “Sharing tools” or embed the code directly to your blog or facebook page, and thats it!
The difference with Sproutbuilder is that these widgets actually look sharp!
Another amazing aspect of Sproutbuilder is that any update you make on the Sproutbuilder site will AUTOMATICALLY update all of your published widgets.. wherever they are! There is no need to update them individually.
This is one of many web 3.0 [yep you heard it!] applications about to hit the market. Click on the image below to see how strikingly similar to Flash and Photoshop the online interface is.
Although the widget is deployed as a .swf [flash] behind the scenes, the application is built with an Adobe technology called Flex. Flex uses the Actionscript 3 language to build rich internet applications that can be ported to actual standalone applications [user can install direct on their computer and run offline]. In addition, Adobe Labs has created “Adobe Air” to convert applications to installable stand alone programs.
Just to get a glimpse of where this is going, my 15 year old brother built this sprout without any help at all…
The ability is here! The Flex framework is allowing developers to create amazingly portable applications in a fraction of the time it used to.
Now all you have to do is learn AS3 and cash in[:
Peace,
Frost