Ah, got it now. There's really not a definite reason that there are no promo badges just yet, but one big one is that we're still in private beta. It's disheartening for a user to come to our site via a badge and not be able to use something immediately...but definitely something we're willing to explore

• 8 weeks ago

Not at all, they're only for your personal consumption...don't go anywhere else, the public can't see them...

• 8 weeks ago

While I'm not belittling your intelligence in this field by any means, I'm just trying to set forth the limitations of our own app to be able to do this. With 1.0 it was impossible because we weren't even collecting user data...with 2.0 we got closer, but now we need to be able to expose the data to the outside, not just our profiles within our walls. Once we are able to do that, we'll be able to build that into a widget no problem...getting to that point just takes time.

• 8 weeks ago

To explain a bit better...this initial batch of apps were basically to test our implementation of RSS parsing. We hadn't previously used a straight-up RSS parser (outside of an API) for data on any service before. Before we add services that rely on RSS (which happen to be a lot of the top voted apps: Google Reader, generics RSS, Tumblr, Blogger, Amazon, StumbleUpon, etc.) we had to test the implementation on a few cases. Saying it's "easy" is because the apps we chose to demo this (Plurk and Guitar Hero 3, which has been completed for months) were the easiest implementation of the RSS spec to test it. Generic RSS is tough because there's a lot of sanitizing of the feed that goes on, so that a feed doesn't inadvertently screw up the rest of the app.

Rest assured, we're dedicated to being able to provide as many apps as we can, as quick as we can. Now that we've accomplished a few of the big hurdles that were keeping us from apps like Google Reader and generic RSS, we'll be able to get those in within short order.

• 8 weeks ago

Oh just you wait...they're on their way. First we had to build the profiles, and then services to populate the profiles...and then we'd be able to build badges. It's all a very linear sequence of events, so now the time is getting closer...

• 8 weeks ago