I’ve been meaning to look into Clearspring’s widget platform for a while, so when I came across the In Rainbows widget on Mashable I thought I’d give the platform a quick test run from the end–user’s point of view. If you don’t know or care what a widget is then switch off now and wait for me to post about some more pretty pictures.

Posting the widget to my MySpace profile was really easy – I just popped in my username and password and chose which area of my profile I wanted to add the widget to. It was like taking candy from a baby that was asleep, and was giving away free candy.

Facebook was a different matter. I had to be logged into Facebook, after which posting the widget to my profile was straightforward. What actually ended up on my profile page was a bit of a joke however. An item appeared in my mini–feed declaring that I had “ posted a video”. The title of this video was “Widget”, and had I not written “Testing the Radiohead In Rainbows widget” in the optional “comments” field, my friends would have been left with no idea what the hell I had posted. This is quite simply crap.

Next I tried to post it as a blog post on Sleevelessness, which is powered by Blogger. I was expected to construct a blog post in the world’ smallest form and I wasn’t able to add any HTML tags, which meant I had to log into Blogger and edit the post manually. I would have been better off copying the embed code.

Don’t get me wrong, I think widgets are a great idea in principle – the idea of being able to create one application and plug it into a range of platforms is a very powerful one. It’s just a matter of both the widget platforms and the social networks working on their respective sides of the integration.