The Martha Stewart Recipes widget is a proof-of-concept widget.  Don't get too fond of it in its current form - it's almost guaranteed to change, and might even disappear at any time.

There were 3 recipes to choose from...Chicken and Ginger, Alfred's Pear Salad and Berry Pound Cake. Appeared instantly in my inbox...very cool! Pretty piccies too...very clean design.

No looking up...but one day who knows? If this is the future...I'm liking it already!

No, all three worked perfectly...emails and widget appearance...

But later when I tried to show the widget to someone... it showed the chicken, then the salad, then reverted back to the chicken without showing the pound cake...didn't try email button that time...

Hmmm...interesting.  I'll see if I can track that down.

Yes, there *will* be a few more free chumbys given away.  I discussed this here: http://chumby.wordpress.com/2006/09/13/ … ns-wanted/

Angela's enthusiasm and craft-interest was so overwhelming that we collectively decided that we simply *had* to make sure she got one -- from a small handful left over after FOO Camp.

More will be coming -- though probably not until the end of October or early November.  We *will* be giving some of these away.  Haven't figured out the exact number, probably something like 50 or so.  And I am personally going through all the submissions from people who want a free chumby and have submitted a compelling purpose for it -- I spent a good chunk of my Sunday reviewing these, it's going to take some time.  So don't lose hope -- but also don't expect that everyone who asked for a free chumby will be getting one, we've had thousands of submissions.

We do appreciate everyone's interest in Chumby.  And for those of you who don't get a free one, please know that we are doing everything in our power to make them as inexpensive as possible -- we care more about putting lots of chumbys into the world than about making money on each one.

This particular widget knows how to send a message to our server which will initiate the email.  The widget itself does not know the email address - it sends the widget instance information, which is then validated within our server (Does this widget instance belong to that widget, channel and user?  Does the widget have permission to initiate email?) and the email is sent to the address recorded in our database.

It's not a relay - you cannot initiate emails to arbitrary email addresses.

This feature is only available to certain authorized partners through our service.  However, an independent author is welcome to have their own widgets initiate emails from their own servers - it's up to them to collect email addresses and decide the best strategy for validation.

Well, these are features that are offered to certain partners that desire or require those sorts of premium features.  For the reasons you've noted, it's not a good idea to make these sorts of capabilities open for inevitable abuse.

As a developer, you're welcome to create a relationship with us that gives access to these capabilities, or, as I mentioned, you're welcome to create your own similar system - it's really not that hard.

As far as competing with developers - our position is that we're going to keep developing widgets of our own and in partnerships with others.  Very few of our widgets take advantage of services that aren't openly available to everyone, and most of those have been mainly technology demonstrations. Our view is that the users will decide which widgets are the ones they want to use, independent of their authorship.

If the third-party developers generate enough quality widgets, we'd naturally be better off expending our energy elsewhere, and you'd probably see us creating fewer over time.

We're working on figuring out how to renumerate widget developers that want some sort of payment, but in general we're hoping that folks will make widget for Chumby for the same reasons they make them for Dashboard, Konfabulator, Google Gadgets, and other "free-as-in-beer" widget systems.

If you want to create a widget that contains advertising, I suppose you're welcome to do so.  Obviously, since users choose which widgets to run, if the ads are obnoxious, such widgets will get no traction.

Same goes for subscription widgets - by attaching a payment to a widget, you'd better have some really special content, because we're not going to prevent others from making widgets that may do similar things for free.

It's extremely unlikely that *we'll* be granting any sort of exclusives on certain content types - for instance, a developer can't stake our an entire category, like, say "Horoscopes", and expect to get guaranteed subscription revenue and market protection by chumby from other developers.

That's a business risk the widget developer is going to have to take.

Obviously, there will be some natural content exclusivity based on copyright and trademarks - it would be tough for a someone other than Disney to create a widget containing Disney content.

In the current system, we do host all of the widgets.  The obvious danger of not being the gatekeeper is that we're found liable for inappropriate or illegal content.