Credit where it is due, my friend Jason pointed me in the direction of a site that had a snazzy toolbar at the bottom that had support for Twitter, Facebook, and Google Translate. I figured it could not be home grown, and it took little digging to find it was Wibiya.
My biggest takeaways is that it is not obtrusive, and has a really unique take on using Facebook Connect. It also keeps Twitter, Facebook, (including our Page) Translate, Recent Posts, Subscribe to RSS, Bookmarking, and Flickr -- yes, a ton of stuff -- in a very minimal and very nicely designed interface at the base of the page.
I think it is really important to keep Twitter and Facebook front and center for organizations like ours, and this toolbar does that. Oh, yea, and Wibiya is in beta, they are still making changes and additions. From reading through their Get Satisfaction page, they have already added some changes suggested by the community.
On the Developer Blog here you will find the Wibiya Toolbar, as I am testing it and making sure it works and does not brake things. I have requested the opinions of our Fans on Facebook as well as our Alumni Group, and would like anyone else viewing this to tell me what they think of the toolbar at the bottom of the page. You can even vote in the poll to the right!
Hit the jump for a bunch of technical mumbo jumbo.
My biggest takeaways is that it is not obtrusive, and has a really unique take on using Facebook Connect. It also keeps Twitter, Facebook, (including our Page) Translate, Recent Posts, Subscribe to RSS, Bookmarking, and Flickr -- yes, a ton of stuff -- in a very minimal and very nicely designed interface at the base of the page.
I think it is really important to keep Twitter and Facebook front and center for organizations like ours, and this toolbar does that. Oh, yea, and Wibiya is in beta, they are still making changes and additions. From reading through their Get Satisfaction page, they have already added some changes suggested by the community.
On the Developer Blog here you will find the Wibiya Toolbar, as I am testing it and making sure it works and does not brake things. I have requested the opinions of our Fans on Facebook as well as our Alumni Group, and would like anyone else viewing this to tell me what they think of the toolbar at the bottom of the page. You can even vote in the poll to the right!
Hit the jump for a bunch of technical mumbo jumbo.
There is a not-so-nice problem with jQuery, but the developers are obviously aware of how to deal with it, as they replied to me right away. Here are my initial thoughts on the Wibiya toolbar.
I figured that the FB Community with FB Connect would ask me for my FB API key, as I am already using FB Connect on our site. I guess Wibiya does this so that there is less hassle to the user, but would be a nice option to allow to use my own FB App that I am using for the rest of the site.
We use a Google Custom Search Engine. It would be really nice to be able to plugin the query string for our Google CSE. Since your toolbar is already setup to use Google, would it be possible to include the option on the Toolbar Dashboard to add our own CSE ID and search URL?
As I already posted a problem about, I get an API Key error when I try and translate a page, though it does translate the page for me. Clicking OK on that error is not very friendly though.
As for the Recent Posts, I could do without the thumbnail at the left. Could this be a config on the toolbar dashboard to turn off thumbnails there, especially since not all posts have images?
Flickr photo set is nice, but it seems to add quite a lot of overhead to actually loading the toolbar, so I turned it off. I had to search Get Satisfaction because I was not putting in the correct info. Can you change the Dashboard to say Photo Set ID and not Flickr Album, because that is confusing. The 3D photo gallery looks nice though.
There seems to be a z-index issue with our Issuu widget in FF 3 Windows. This does not do this in FF 3 Mac or Safari.
We use an Issuu widget to display our PDF of the newspaper. I do not know what the z-index is of that widget. But it seems to be higher than the Wibiya toolbar?
I have some questions/ideas:
Would it be possible to turn off the Random button?
Does this toolbar work with subdomains of the same domain name?
Is it possible to install this same toolbar on multiple sites, i.e. add multiple domains to our Wibiya profile?
My first impression of the Wibiya toolbar was on FIlmSchoolRejects. I am an Editor at Blogcritics and we have a few FSR writers at BC. But when I loaded the FSR site it was just crawling. Seriously slow. I did not know if it was the toolbar or the site. After installing it and fiddling with it on my Developer Blog it does not seem to add much overhead at all, which was my primary concern.
So far the toolbar looks like a great product. I can't wait to see where this thing goes.
UPDATE: Daniel Tal from Wibiya wrote back and addressed pretty much every issue/question I had. These guys rock!
I figured that the FB Community with FB Connect would ask me for my FB API key, as I am already using FB Connect on our site. I guess Wibiya does this so that there is less hassle to the user, but would be a nice option to allow to use my own FB App that I am using for the rest of the site.
We use a Google Custom Search Engine. It would be really nice to be able to plugin the query string for our Google CSE. Since your toolbar is already setup to use Google, would it be possible to include the option on the Toolbar Dashboard to add our own CSE ID and search URL?
As I already posted a problem about, I get an API Key error when I try and translate a page, though it does translate the page for me. Clicking OK on that error is not very friendly though.
As for the Recent Posts, I could do without the thumbnail at the left. Could this be a config on the toolbar dashboard to turn off thumbnails there, especially since not all posts have images?
Flickr photo set is nice, but it seems to add quite a lot of overhead to actually loading the toolbar, so I turned it off. I had to search Get Satisfaction because I was not putting in the correct info. Can you change the Dashboard to say Photo Set ID and not Flickr Album, because that is confusing. The 3D photo gallery looks nice though.
There seems to be a z-index issue with our Issuu widget in FF 3 Windows. This does not do this in FF 3 Mac or Safari.
We use an Issuu widget to display our PDF of the newspaper. I do not know what the z-index is of that widget. But it seems to be higher than the Wibiya toolbar?
I have some questions/ideas:
Would it be possible to turn off the Random button?
Does this toolbar work with subdomains of the same domain name?
Is it possible to install this same toolbar on multiple sites, i.e. add multiple domains to our Wibiya profile?
My first impression of the Wibiya toolbar was on FIlmSchoolRejects. I am an Editor at Blogcritics and we have a few FSR writers at BC. But when I loaded the FSR site it was just crawling. Seriously slow. I did not know if it was the toolbar or the site. After installing it and fiddling with it on my Developer Blog it does not seem to add much overhead at all, which was my primary concern.
So far the toolbar looks like a great product. I can't wait to see where this thing goes.
UPDATE: Daniel Tal from Wibiya wrote back and addressed pretty much every issue/question I had. These guys rock!
Anonymous comments are always moderated, please sign in and join the discussion. 
What do you think about Skysa.com in comparison to Wibiya. I am trying to decide what one would be best for my website.