Here is quick roundup of this week’s interesting widget news, trends and analysis:

• Britney Spear Tour Widgets Makes Debut
  All artists need them, smart artists have them – widgets! Britney’s social media manager Lauren Kozak announces a new widget to celebrate the second North American leg of Britney’s tour.
• Digital Photo Frame Widgets are the Future!
  This week Sungale announced a Wifi Widget photo frame with a 800 x 600 resolution touchscreen boasts 512 MB of internal storage for only $165 (available next month). Expect to see digital photo frames become mainstream (probably this Christmas) as more intelligence and functionality is built into them. I think the real value (and money) is in MANAGING the content that goes out on these digital internet-enabled photo frames. One of our clients, FrameChannel, does exactly this and has a phenomenal service aimed at delivering almost any type of content (Photos, News, Twitter, Facebook, i.e.) via digital photo frames!
• Your are Never Too Old to Make a Widget – IBM Widgets for LinkedIn
  Its probably been a while since many of us use a product from IBM (remember Lotus Notes), but the company recently announced the first two in a new initiative to develop widgets for a wide variety of business needs including TripIt and LinkedIn apps integratd into Lotus Notes desktop!
• Vendors Start Announcing and Releasing Yahoo TV Widgets and FiOS TV Widgets
  Sonic Solutions announced a Roxio CinemaNow Yahoo! TV Widget (available in the fall) that allows users to search, rent and buy movies. Interative TV games provider, PlayJam is planning to offer a Yahoo TV widget. Verizon is bringing Twitter, Facebook and YouTube widgets to its FiOS TV platform. Vizio announced that some popular services including eBay, Facebook, Twitter, Rallypoint Sports, Showtime, Revision3, Radiotime, and Vudu, will be available on their HDTV’s, powered by the Yahoo TV Widgets engine. Microsoft’s Xbox 360 already features Netflix Watch Instantly, and later this fall will also offer Facebook and Twitter.  

A summary of recent music and technology posts on this and other Metablocks blogs:

• Artist.com: What Should I build my Music Website On?
• Custom Facebook Applications for Music Artist
• Warner Music, Sony BMG, Universal and Drupal! What Gives?
• Music Artists and Widgets: Marketing Guide
• Country Music Fans and Digital Music Sales
• Altantic Records and Social Media

We build a lot of custom Facebook applications for all sort of large brands, non-profits and music labels. Like a website in the Web 1.0 era, Facebook applications are becoming  a staple of many online marketing campaigns, music artist included. There are a couple of example of Facebook applications (some build by ourselves and some by other folks) that give you an idea of the types of music artist facebook apps out there:

• Interscope Records Song Card: Multiple Artists including Lady Gaga
• Chris Brown (Zomba Label Group)
• U2 Mixtape (Univeral Music)
• Chris Sligh Get Out the Vote (Brash Musich)
• Coldplay Widget (Brash Music)

Good examples are hard to find, so if you know of any please share them via comments. Also been on the lookout for some very interesting music artist FB applications in the next couple of weeks including the beta of SuperFan, our music artist promotional tool for Facebook.