Almost every business benefits by using photos to help tell their story. Increasingly, businesses are turning to Flickr as the perfect channel for serving their pictures.

In the last few months, a tide of new tools for sharing Flickr photos and sets have flooded the market. For the most part, these are free utilities that you use on the web. You enter some info, click “Create” and grab some code to put on a web page or in your blog.

We’ve found a lot of great tools for re-distributing Flickr photos. Flickr makes its own tools (which are very nice). FlickrSlidr is also cool (see it on our Photo page).

Most of the widgets we found were approximately square in shape: 1:1 or maybe 4:3. So, when we needed a wide horizontal slide show widget (16:9 or better), we searched around and found Slideoo.

Slideoo is simple to use. We created the widget in about 5 minutes. Their embed code worked perfectly (see above).

You can set the width and picture size with Slideoo. The widget above is 700px wide with "medium" pictures. The flash includes “+/-” buttons and a slider at the bottom. See a different config on our Portfolio page.

The emerging world of widgets lets us concentrate on content, not code, adding cool features without any programming. Slideoo is a great new tool in the utility belt.

** Realtors could use this to show lots of pictures of a property without crowding up a web page.

All photos ©2009 Goodtree & Co., Inc. All rights reserved.