Coke extends its myCoke online social scene to the desktop, with this real-time list showing which of your virtual friends are online.

The application

The good

• There's an old marketing wives' tale I'm sure you've heard about the Coca-Cola marketing strategy: if it moves, paint it red; if it doesn't, put a logo on it. Well, that theory seems to be at work here. There's a Coke logo, and you can see which of your v-ego friends (Coke Music users) are online. That's it.

The bad

• Not interactive at all. You can't click through to the web and open myCoke.com. You have to log in to use the widget anyway. Why not just give me a click to the site and log me in on the way? It would retain a lot more users.
  
  In fact, there are two clickable links: terms and conditions and myCoke's privacy policy. If you're building a widget for your legal and compliance department, this might be a good place to start. But in this situation, it only highlights the deficiencies.
  
• And for a social site BDA, why not offer chat? Creating a BDA integrating AIM, MSN and myCoke would be a boon for all the v-ego'd teens out there.
  
• My poor eyes. This is another case where adding a little white around the logo would have gone a long way. As it stands, I can't look at the Coke red against my blue-background desktop pictures for more than a few seconds.
  
• And I really can't understand why they didn't just port myCoke right onto the desktop. It already pops out with its own browser window. This is another case where technology sitting just on the edge of what a browser can handle works with ease on the desktop. I've got dual processors trying to churn their way through laborious myCoke loading screens. This could have been done in the background while I was idle on the desktop.

The ugly

• Yes, it gets worse. The experience surrounding this BDA was actually poorer than the BDA itself. First, it's a Yahoo Widget. But it doesn't appear on the Yahoo Widget Gallery, which is where the myCoke instructions tell you to download it. Luckily, they fixed this a few days in, allowing users to download it directly.
  
• No integration? I was emailed shortly after downloading the "Friends" widget to download a widget of all Coke games. No thanks. Looks cool in the email, but their BDA efforts are already damaged goods, leaving me wondering why they didn't add the games to the widget I worked so hard to find and download in the first place.

What you can take away

• If you can leverage existing habits in open-source technology, go for it! Got teens chatting on IM? Give them a cooler, branded chat client to use.
  
• It's easy to make BDAs viral. At the very least, a simple "Send this BDA to a friend" button on the desktop will do wonders for your offering.
  
• Make it practical and interactive. Give your users the self-evident path to the next step in the process and they'll thank you with loyalty and an astonishing amount of exposure.