We just found out we were chosen by the editors of Webware, a CNET site led by Rafe Needleman, as a finalist for this year’s Webware 100 awards and we're really psyched about it. Thanks to all of you who nominated us. We greatly appreciate it!

The Webware 100 Awards recognize great Web 2.0 sites, services, and applications that are leading the next wave of innovation. We were selected in the Publishing & Photography category among other great web 2.0 companies including Twitter, WordPress, flickr, FeedBurner, and Photobucket.

And, now, the fun begins! You get to vote for the ultimate winners and we would be grateful if you voted for us. Voting ends Monday, March 31, 2008 so don't wait too long.

Thanks for your vote!
http://www.webware.com/html/ww/100/2...

About a month ago, we participated in Bebo's launch for their Open Application Platform with two apps: Bite Some Sugar and The Gap Model Maker. Last Thursday, Bebo fully opened their platform to all third party application developers, in a very similar manner to Facebook's f8 platform launch last May.

When we did our last developer conference about OpenSocial on Nov 8th, we promised our (awesome) developer community that we would provide accelerators for every platform that opens up their APIs. We believe incredibly strongly in doing this, as we want to allow our developers to be able to focus on what they do best - building great widgets - while we take care of the rest. I'm pleased to announce that we have added Bebo to our list of accelerators!

We've been working with Bebo over the last couple of months on this, and we are so thrilled with the initial response. Since Bebo opened their platform last Thursday, our community has provided over 50% of the new apps on Bebo - that is incredibly exciting!! We're looking forward to seeing many more apps made through our accelerator, so keep 'em coming. Here's some more info to help you get started.

I really want to congratulate Bebo on this effort. They are the first major platform after Facebook to take a truly open stance. We believe this is 100% the right way to go, and hope that many more follow these footsteps. Everyone should have a chance at at major success on these platforms, not just a hand-selected bunch.

Also, if you haven't joined Bebo yet, what are you waiting for? Sign up and make Widgetbox your friend!

Oh, and in case you are wondering who the breakaway "accelerated" leader is on Bebo at the moment, it's the Idiot Test. You have to play this game. It is frighteningly addictive...

Bebo's new platform is launching tonight with 40 launch partners representing about 50 apps. They plan to open up to any and all third party developers once the platform is stable and users are engaging with it. Pretty exciting stuff!

Widgetbox participated with Bebo's launch with two apps - The Gap ModelMaker, and a new app for Sugar Publishing called Bite Some Sugar. Now, I know you all want to go play with these immediately (and you should - we think they are super fun!), but you'll have to wait until Bebo pushes their platform live, which is sometime tonight. You can do it!

So, a little more about these apps. The Gap ModelMaker was a really cool project we did with The Gap and one of our star developers FancyGens. It's been around a while now, and used our Facebook accelerator to make it into a Facebook app. We did the same thing for Bebo, and if you haven't played around with it yet, I definitely recommend making you and all your friends into Gap models - it's awesome!

Bite Some Sugar is a new take on the MySugar widget we had done with Sugar Inc. This one pulls in the images from all the Sugar blogs and lets you write your own "sound bite" for the pictures. You can even sound bite images on your friends profiles too.

We'd love to hear what you think once these apps are live, so give them a whirl after tonight and let us know!