GRD Google Fans

It’s been about a month since Google announced its new Friend Connect platform which lets you add social widgets to any blog or web site. If you’ve been waiting patiently to see these widgets start popping up on the wild, wild web, it looks like the wait is over. Tech blogger Orli Yakuel has added a widget to her blog, Go2Web20.

The widget looks a lot like the recent readers widgets you find from services like MyBlogLog. But Friend Connect offers users the opportunity to interact with their contacts and communities more deeply…

For any of you who have heard me rant about widgets lately, you should know that I found some personal vindication tonight watching CNBC’s Fast Money when this little gem came on…

By the way, the show has plenty of web-extra video, including longer form clips of nearly every segment of that day’s show in their Rapid Recap.

Here’s a look at the widget for yourselves.

But for all of us in the industry, what is so tough to comprehend about widgets? Ok, you want a portable rich media unit that plays…

Does anyone care whether we call it a “podcast” or an “mp3″ of something? I’m currently browsing the Zune Marketplace looking for some new podcasts, but I realized its mostly short versions of traditional media (The Today Show Podcast), and the usual, mass distributed webisodes like Ask A Ninja.

My question….does the “buzzword” get in the way of peope’s understanding of the medium? People are asking about widgets without knowing what they are or how to measure their success. Seems a little “horse before the cart” to me. And now…