A good example of a novel minor marketing effort for your start-up. An excellent idea. Putting together something small like the Karma Widget is an enjoyable diversion to boot. We all need those once in a while.

The real kicker here is that he's giving people incentive to group together all their profiles across the web, allowing Duck Duck Go to search people better than anyone else.

That's genius!

This gives me a bit too much foresight credit. Honestly, I got the idea for these widgets after seeing one too many comments like this one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=379936. I agree with that thread that your YC karma isn't too useful on other sites, but then I realized it would be useful to display on your own sites.

So I got to building it... I quickly realized that there is karma on other sites, and it might be cool to aggregate. Then I realized I could possibly generate some new Duck Duck Go users this way. Then I realized (by someone indirectly pointing it out to me), that there are SEO implications when deploying widgets.

But I didn't think (until your comment) about improving search by aggregating profile information :). Just to be clear wrt privacy, we're not currently storing any IP info or the aggregate usernames in the DB, and have no plans to do so: http://duckduckgo.com/privacy.html

Such karma across many platforms and that is verified by trusted contacts(your friends) will prove in general to be extremely powerful for semantic/social services!

For example an idea of mine is to create a Rotten Tomatoes meets Twitter. Instead of indexing/compiling trusted press/bloggers I want a web-service/site that reads, understands and compiles all the reviews on Twitter about each movie. Right now I have to search tons and tons of Twitter search pages, as opposed to a web-service doing this automatically and presenting it in a simple UI. This same idea can be applied to tons of topics..restuarants, hotels, etc, etc....

One issue with this idea is it can be gamed easily, but not if this service only reads, understands and compiles from trusted/verified sources (karma being a good way to achieve this).

Might be abstract, but 1st time writing this idea/thought out!

Beautiful link bait. Seriously, it's a really clever idea. Fortunately/unfortunately Google frowns on link bait unrelated to the core business of your site: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/widgetbait-gone-wild so this is definitely somewhere in the gray SEO area.

You know, what I would love and use right away on some of my blogs is a similar widget but that allows me to include voting badges - particularly one that uses that script that came out a while ago to detect whether the user is logged in those voting sites and displays them only if they are.

That would be one heckuva handy widget!... does it exist anywhere?

You are not your job. You are not your online profiles. You are not your YC karma. But hey, that shouldn't stop you from displaying it...

Sister "Profiles" Widget: http://duckduckgo.com/profiles.html

Live examples: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/

Oh noes! There's no easy way to get from the widget page to your main page. Maybe you should link the top image to '/'?

Good call. Done.

Well done, sir. (P.S. I'm not my fucking khakis. :-)

Luckily for my ego, I am also not how much money I have in the bank. Or the contents of my wallet.

If people would just stop caring about meaningless numbers displayed next to your username, the world would be a better place. Specifically, the world of community-moderated sites wouldn't have to put up with crap submissions that exist solely to gather up-votes.

What makes you think that karma is meaningless? I find it meaningful.

Sometimes I read a troll-like post, and check out the user that wrote it. If they have 3000 karma, it is likely that I am missing their point, and need to think some more. If they have -10 karma, then they are probably just a troll.

I know it's "bad" to judge someone by a number... but we do it because it is usually helpful.

What you describe is the intended, valid use of the metric. What I am complaining about is people who care on a personal level about what their own karma is, and who do things just to inflate that number. Facebook/Myspace "friends" whom you don't actually know? "Vote up if *" posts? Lolcat or comic or whatever posts? I know HN is (mostly) blissfully free of these things, but they are a direct consequence of the karma system.

Great way to get new people to go your site!

It's lots of small stuff like this that gets people to go to your site.

Very clever way to spread your presence to other sites!

Suggested additions: Facebook friends and feedburner subscribers.

Noted. Thought about both, but didn't see an easy way to integrate, so put off. Anyone know of any easy way? Feedburner seems only to serve images of the #, and FB seems to require auth.

Here's the way for Feedburner: http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=Hack...

Unfortunately, this returns 0 for most feeds right now, and is apparently a known bug: http://groups.google.com/group/feedburner-for-developers/bro...

I will add Feedburner when they fix this (I hope soon).

Striking out with FB (for w/o auth). It is supremely annoying FB doesn't include the # on their public pages, e.g. http://www.facebook.com/people/Gabriel-Weinberg/700754

Added it to my new site hosted on GAE http://www.danworth.com

I was just working on simple widget that showed my last few comments with links back to HN. Although I'm having mixed feelings about using it on my homepage.

Makes me think... maybe its time BackType came up with a widget... yes? Might save you the trouble.

www.backtype.com

Of course it won't help with your predicament, but it will be easier in case you do decide to display your HN comments.

Hey Raju, we do have widgets :) and you can definitely use it to display HN comments (although not karma): http://www.backtype.com/widgets

Woops! Sorry. My bad. Should have looked harder before commenting. My apologies.

No worries, they're a bit hard to find.

Backtype is nice but it would require me to replace my profile url with one of theirs. It's really geared towards people that don't have a website of their own.

You don't have to replace your profile url with ours, we only suggest that for people that don't have a website.

You could claim your comments: http://www.backtype.com/url/news.ycombinator.com%252fuser%3F... and add them to your account and create a widget no problem.

Can widgets pull in the actual comments? The widget I'm looking at only has a link to the parent article. I'd actually like both.

Right now the search widget is the only one that displays comments: http://mm.urbantwelve.com/

We could do this pretty easily though.

I submitted a formal request as well, just in case no one was monitoring this thread.

Why mixed feelings?

Many of my comments don't make sense without knowledge of the parent article/comment.

Maybe link to links like: http://hystry.com/newsyc/follow/?http://news.ycombinator.com...

If that doesn't work for you I'd love to hear why.

I'd still do it. They are probably still intriguing, and you would provide the links for context.

Facebook is such a noticeable absence. It'll be nice when they are open. Not that I'm holding my breath.

It works for me for YC but not for reddit.

reddit username?

lazyant, duh...

reddit timed out on your initial request. Tried it again, and it worked. Maybe I can find a way to use their so-called "secret api"...

I found this: http://www.programmableweb.com/api/reddit

But can't find anything about getting user info. Anyone here know?

Hi,

Thanks for looking into this and good guess on the username ;-). It's still showing '0' though, in case that helps.

Refresh--the JS is probably cached (set for a day). I see 210 in the DB.

yep, it's working. Nice tool.

karma, the new celebrity status symbol.

Smart idea!

All of you high karma folks around:

'Karma' is a quite recent invention, in fact it dates only a few years back. Everything growing so fast is always exposed to dissolve in even less time...

Are you kidding? Brownie points are old hat.

Err no.

Slashdot had karma-points long before they shifted to simply "Good" or "Excellent" and stuff like that.

How 'old' is internet itself? Not more than the mentioned 'few' years.

Really important (and great) things grow slowly and die slowly.