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"Late last year, Newsweek predicted that 2007 would be the year of the widget.  Boy, were they right!  Aside from the usual buzz that surrounds the likes of Google, Facebook, and MySpace, this year was dominated by stories of companies coming out of nowhere with distributed applications to become household (well, at least Web 2.0 household) names.  In fact, even USA Today has caught on to the trend, highlighting the rise of companies like iLike, Slide, and RockYou in today's edition.  \nWhile flash widgets for things like slideshows and scrapbooks were the big success story in the first half of the year, much of the focus in the space shifted to Facebook applications this summer, with developers building tools ranging from the trivial to attempts to turn the social network into a serious business tool.  Then, just last month Google threw its hat in the ring with the announcement of OpenSocial, an effort to align virtually all of the other major social networks against Facebook in application development.  \nIn short, this should be a wide open category with dozens if not hundreds of companies that feed into the social networking ecosystem to consider nominating.  \nWith that, we open up the category for nominations.  To nominate a widget or application, leave a comment with the word \u201CNOMINATE\u201D in it.  Nominations will remain open until 11:59pm PST on December 4th (next Tuesday).  At that point, we will tally up the nominations and enter the second stage of the competition \u2013 voting.  \nOnce again, a thank you to our sponsors:\nCohn and Wolfe - Our PR partner and co-producer.\nQuintura - Quintura makes you control your web search. You will find what you want as quickly as possible.\nRetailMeNot - The RetailMeNot.com community saves you money by sharing 50,000+ coupon codes for 10,000+ stores.\nStreakr - Discover more of the web you love together with Streakr.com"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2007/11/27/open-web-awards-widgets/>