We have taken the Qwidget service down temporarily for maintenance. We will be back up again in the next few days with improved stability and load times. We apologize for any inconvenience that this down time causes but we hope that you’ll be happy with the improved product when we have it up and running shortly.

Update: The Qwidget is back up and running smoothly.

AdamThinks.com just added the Qwidget to his latest post and this one is pretty funny.  It’s a riff on that immortal subway prank in which someone takes a wet paint sign, tears it up and tapes them all back together. I agree with Adam when he says, “Whoever first thought to tear off the P and rearrange the words is a genius. So perfect in both form and function, it’s hard to believe the idea ever did not exist.”

Adam has been on a mission to bring a little poetry to the prank and has been creating little bits of absurdist wet paint humor in subways all over New York City.  Here’s my favorite:

He’s now used a Qwidget to pull readers in to give their ideas on new ideas for Wet Paint anagrams.  I went for a reference to the famous SNL Celebrity Jeopardy skit in which Sean Connery keeps mistaking “A petit” for “Ape Tit.” 

Marshall Sponder, the blogger behind The Analytics Guru, has begun using the Qwidget on another blog of his, Web Metrics Guru.  He writes about the types of metrics and research you can do with Facebook.

Notice how Marshall placed the Qwidget in the middle of his post.  It’s an interesting use of the Qwidget that I have played with a bit on this blog.  Initially, we thought the Qwidget would always sit at the bottom of a post.  But it obviously can be used anywhere within a post to entice readers to engage in dialogue, even if it interrupts the flow of the post.  I’ll be interested to see how and where other bloggers use the Qwidget. 

I am very pleased to announce that Marshall Sponder’s The Analytics Guru blog has become the very first blog (other than this one) to use the Qwidget. The question asked involves the cool Facebook-CNN inauguration mashup that allowed you to stream the inauguration ceremony while chatting with your Facebook friends via status updates all on CNN.com.  Marshall will continue to use the Qwidget on some of the other sites in his blog network - Blog Speedway.

According to a Washington Post-ABC News poll, 61% of Americans support Obama’s choice of mega-church pastor Rick Warren to give the inauguration invocation. One might expect the disapproving minority to be made up of liberals incensed over Rev. Warren’s opposition to gay marriage.

However, this is not the case. According to the same poll, a full 66% of Democrats endorsed the pick while only 60% of both Republicans and Independents did.  Is this a case of partisans on the right disapproving of Obama’s pick even though Warren seems to share more values with evangelical conservatives?

We have been receiving reports from some of our users that the process of reading new Qwidget messages was confusing.  So we reacted.  Here’s the new process.  I hope it helps. 
Feedback in your answers would be much appreciated.
[ed. note]: The title of this post was changed from “New Message Icon Added to the Qwidget” to “Mail Icon Added to Qwidget” because users reported that they thought the icon would appear only when a new message was present. Since many people will go to a Qwidget to find their messages when they are not signed in automatically, we needed the icon to always be visible. We’re working towards a more clear process.]

As this is the first public blog post with a Qwidget attached, we here at Qwidget headquarters (a quarter of a loft in Hell’s Kitchen, NYC) are feeling like this is a new day.  A new start for us.  A big change.  We started life as a company producing content only to realize that web publishers and bloggers like us needed a better way to engage their audiences around their content.  So we set out to build the Qwidget.

A lot of people in America and the rest of the world are also feeling like a new day is upon us.  Some are excited about that; some are not.  So the first question that we are asking with the Qwidget should be fairly obvious.  Please spend the few seconds it takes to create an account and give an answer.  If someone else has given an interesting response, send a quick reply.  They will get it next time they answer a Qwidget question (no matter what question they are answering and no matter what site they are on).  A few things may not work as this the first public appearance of the Qwidget, but please be understanding with us while we improve the service.  Change is never easy, you know.

I’m very excited to announce that today we are launching the new Qwidget website and logo.  I am tempted to explain all the reasons that I think our logo totally rocks and why it perfectly represents the Qwidget.  However, a logo should make a statement without the impassioned backing of the product manager, so I’m going to be quiet and let it do the talking.

The logo was designed by the talented designer (and my very good friend) Erin Kilkenny whose work can be found here.  Both the Qwidget blog and the main Qwidget.com site were done by another very talented web designer Marco Castro.  His work is here. [Ed. note: Ever the honorable designer, Marco asked me to point out that Erin played very strong role in coming up with the concept for the site design which Marco then refined and implemented.]

With the launch of qwidget.com, we are revealing the actual functionality of the Qwidget - what it does, how it does it and how it can help you as a blogger generate conversations on your blog.  For a complete run through on all of that, check out the feature tour.  You can also get a quick sense from the graphic below, which also appears on the main qwidget.com site.  Also, be sure to check out the video demo that I put together for the main site.  And please leave feedback here.  I plan on updating it and revising it according to feedback I get here.

In the coming days, we will be putting the Qwidget up on this blog so you can test out the features.  And shortly after that, we’ll be releasing it to our initial group of beta testers.  If you’re interested in joining that group, please sign up here.