Wibiya Website Toolbar

Wibi... what? I've no idea what it means, but Wibiya allows you to add a toolbar to your website. The toolbar is situated at the bottom of your web browser. Basically, it adds functionality to your website. The tool is still in beta, and you need to sign up to get access. Upon registration you wil receive an invite code within a couple of hours.

The toolbar holds several (configurable) tools you can use to display;

• a search bar (powered by Google Search).
  So if google doesn't (want to) know you, you won't find many search results
• a translate-this-page-to-<20 languages> option (powered by Google Translate).
• recent / random posts from your website/blog.
  based on your RSS feed.
• your Twitter Status.
• Photo album
  You need a Flickr account for that.
  
• Facebook crap.
• etc.

Customization of the toolbar is being done on Wibiya website (where you obviously have to create an account). The first image shown is an overview of the functionalities you can add to the toolbar.

Wibiya Toolbar Options

The available tools aren't that special. Most of them are already available (through plug-ins / widgets) on several blogging platform. The Website Search, and Post Navigator parts rely on information available at Google Search and the availability of a RSS feed on your website.

The second image shows the available types of websites. If you use something not listed (basically the last option), Wibiya generates a piece of code which you need to add to the header part of the pages where you want the toolbar to show.

Preconfigured Wibiya UsagesFor the time being I implemented the toolbar on this website. Don't know how long I'll keep it up there, since it doesn't add anything new to the functionality I already have implemented here. And at the first sign of some sort of incompatibility with the existing SquareSpace features, it goes out the proverbial window.

My initial conclusion is that there's nothing really special about the Wibiya toolbar. It just combines several (available) tools in one place. Most of these tools are already available on e.g. the Wordpress platform through the use of widgets.

Update on Wednesday, December 16, 2009 at 22:31 by Willem

Small adjustment to the original post; the Notification option on Wibiya.com Toolbaar is kinda nice.