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Daniel Burka announced on Digg’s official Blog they released Digg Widgets built off of their API.

The widget lets you display latest Digg stories on your website. All you have to do is to pick a preffered theme, customize the widget, set the display options and finally paste the generated script code into your site’s HTML code.

There’s a plenty of configuration options. You can set the widget to display all popular stories, a top 10 list, stories dugg by a specified user, popular stories from your favorite site, stories dugg by your friends etc. You can also easily customize the widget’s appearance.

Basically this is a very easy way to make use of the Digg’s API. Without writing a single line of code you can show Digg’s content on your website in a way you need.

Yes, Google already owns a social network - Orkut - which is, however, barely known outside countries like Brazil and India. It’s not a surprise then that they decided to sponsor a new project by Carnegie Mellon University?s Human-Computer Interaction Institute called Socialstream.

As listed on the page, the main goals of the project include:

• Rethinkng and reinventing online social networking
• Discovering the user needs related to social networking and exploring how a unified social network service can enhance their experience.
• Creating a system for users to seamlessly share, view, and respond to many types of social content across multiple networks

Socialstream aspires to be a “unified social network” (USN), which means it would be rather an aggregator of social websites we already use, than a new network.

If you are interested in the whole development process and research they have done to make the product better, there’s a lot of information available on the project’s website.

The video below is a nice demonstration of how Socialstream could be used in the future. At the moment though, there’s no information when the project will be launched (if ever).

I know this video is from 2005 and many of you have already seen it, but anyway I think it’s worth watching again. The Steve Jobs’ Stanford Commencement Speech has always been a great source of inspiration for me and I like to listen to it whenever I feel less motivated.

And here’s the speech in text.

I first discovered Flock, the social web browser, when the 0.4 version was around (about two years ago) and from the very first launch I knew I will be using this application as a primary browser some time in the future. At that time Flock wasn’t ready to be used on a daily basis, but I kept an eye on how it was developed and eventually switched from Firefox to Flock 0.7 to become a happy Flockstar.

I’ve always loved the clean, light-weight interface, the media bar, the integration with popular Web 2.0 services like Flickr, del.icio.us and blogging platforms like Wordpress or Blogger. My favorite feature however has always been the Shelf (later renamed to Web Snippets). Basically it allowed users to drag text, links or pictures from any website to a gray “shelf” (kind of a toolbar), where all the items were stored. You could view them later or post them to your blog. Very nice way to store things found on the Web.

Many things changed though in the latest Flock 0.9 release and unfortunately, I have to say, this is a first major release which I really have mixed feelings about.

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I’d like to announce that I’m going away on holiday tomorrow so I won’t be able to write any new posts. I really feel like I need to unplug and spend some time offline.

I’ll be back on July 15th with fresh content - stay tuned.