It was only a matter of time until we got around to Twitter. Plus we had a lot of requests for this gadget, so how could we not take a stab at it? The Twitter Explorer gadget is a basic foray into the popular social micro-blogging platform and we hope that it goes over well.

Features:

• View recent activity, mentions, and trends
• Search Twitter or view trending topics in either a flyout or the browser
• Post updates, reply, or retweet posts in a flyout complete with short URL Bit.ly support
• Click on a posting user’s name or picture to see their stats and info
• 2 different full themes (way more than a background change)
• 4 height sizes, each with a narrow and wide mode
• Wide mode shows user pictures as well as names
• View the rate limit and any errors in a small but handy flyout

As always, we appreciate any and all feedback, requests, error reports, etc. We will do our best to take everything into consideration for future updates and fixes.

Download: BuildAGadget.com – Widgipedia.com – Live.com Gallery

Since this gadget came out there have been a group of users who have had trouble getting the login code to work on the gadget. After going through everything we could, we released the 1.0.3 version of the gadget to get additional information and here is what we found:

Almost every login code error we received was a 100 – Missing Parameter error. This means that the code isn’t being sent into Facebook either properly or at all. With that in mind, we have a new version of the gadget designed to circumvent the current system to hopefully provide the code straight from the user input to the gadget to Facebook without involving the sidebar API too much.

In laymen terms, we think we fixed it.

Also in this update the Facebook logo on top of the gadget is now clickable and links directly to facebook.com.

Download: BuildAGadget.com – Widgipedia.com – Live.com Gallery

Do you use Facebook to keep in touch with your friends, co-workers, and / or family? Great news! Now you can track your messages on the sidebar. The Facebook Explorer gadget helps you manage incoming messages, friend activities, and even set or clear your status message.

Download: BuildAGadget.com – Widgipedia.com – Live.com Gallery

Please let us know if you run into any problems or have any comments. Feel free to reply on the blog, on our forum, or on Twitter.

Yesterday our server ran into a small problem and we’ve since rectified most of the issues. For the interim, we’re taking the Market Monitor down for maintenance and upgrades.

We apologize for the gap in service and should have a better, more stable model of this gadget ready to go sometime soon. Thank you for your patience.

Update: The gadget is now up and running.

We’ve had a lot of chatter concerning the lack of European realm status on this gadget and we felt it was time to get moving on it. Actually, we got a great tip (thanks Bertrand!) that WoW-Europe.com has an XML feed, they just decided to hide it from everyone for some weird reason. You can imagine how much easier that makes everything.

So now if you download the gadget and live in Europe, just head into the settings panel on the gadget and change your region to EU and hit okay. Voila! You can now track most of the realms in the feed.

We say most of the realms because there was a rather large problem getting the Russian Cyrillic characters to save in the profile. Until we can figure out how to get them properly encoded, those playing on Russian realms will have to look elsewhere for status tracking. We apologize for this and hope that we can get this fixed up in the future.

Also, if you run across an entry in the list that says “Alert”, don’t save it, it’s just an indicator for various maintenance activities. If you do save it, when it disappears, you may have to reset the gadget.

Download: BuildAGadget.com – Widgipedia.com – Live.com Gallery

Please let us know if you run into any problems or have any comments. Feel free to reply on the blog, on our forum, or on Twitter.