We are really excited to bring all you eBay users a new way to view and track auctions directly on your homepage. In the new Favorite Widgets experience, you will see a brand-new eBay widget. With this new widget, you can now track multiple auctions right from AOL.

When you first see the eBay widget, you'll notice an Search Ebay box as well as links for hot eBay auctions going on right now. If you are looking for something specific, just type the term into the search field and click Search. You'll see results for auctions that match what you are looking for. In the example below, I have searched for "kayak" as an example.

If you put your mouse over any of the small pictures on the left side of the search results, you'll get even more information about the auction. Depending on what the seller has provided in the auction, there may be different information available in this view.

If its something that strikes your fancy and you might be interested in keeping an eye on to see what happens with the auction, you can click on the "Track on AOL" button and this will add it to your Tracked Items list. You'll notice that when you click this button, it will change to "Stop Tracking" to allow you to take it off your list if you'd like. I'll show you how to do that later in the post. If and when you're ready to make your move on the auction, you can click on the link for any of the item titles and go off to eBay directly to try your luck at bidding!

To see all of the items that you are tracking, just click on the link for Tracked Items which is just above the Search box.

Here you'll see the list of all of the items you are tracking including how much time is left, the current price and how many bids there are on the auction. You can also put your cursor over the image to see the more detailed information. You can add up to 20 items. Don't want to track something any more? Just click "Stop Tracking" and it will be removed from the list. Want to search for something else? Just click on the Search link and you're ready to find more great eBay items.

We think this module is a great tool to be able to get you get a quick glance of all the auctions you are tracking to make sure you don't miss out on winning cool stuff! Please let us know what you think about the new eBay experience.

Learn more about the other cool things you can do with the Favorite Widgets experience.

For you photography lovers, a great new widget we have added as part of the Favorite Widgets experience is a Flickr experience. If you aren't familiar with it, Flickr is a photo management and sharing site. The Flickr widget lets you view Flickr photos directly from your homepage!

You can access the Flickr widget by clicking on the tab in the Favorite Widgets module (you will likely see eBay as the initial tab).

When you click on the tab, you will see a grid of 10 of the most recent photos. If you put your mouse over any of the images, you can see a larger view of the photo. See below what a mouseover image looks like:

A fun way to use the widget is to customize the photos you want to see on your page. If you click on the Options link in the top right of the widget, you will bring up a screen to customize your photo viewing.

You have the option to view either "Popular" or "Most Recent" photos. "Popular" is based on Flickr's way of finding interesting photos from number of comments or number of their users who save as a favorite. "Most Recent" is exactly that -- photos that have recently been uploaded to Flickr.

You will also see two fields for "Tag" and "Member". You can narrow the photos that you see by using these features. Tags are like keywords or labels that are added to a photo to make it easier to find later. So if you put the tag of "bulldog puppies" and then click save, then you'll only see popular or most recent photos that users have tagged to include bulldog puppies. If there aren't any photos available for what you are looking for, you'll get a message letting you know.

Similarly, if you know of Flickr users you can add member names to see their photos. Remember that you'll only see their photos if that user is lucky enough to have one of their pictures included in what Flickr deems interesting/popular or if there are part of recent uploads.

You'll also see that you have the ability to either view one large image at a time or go for sensory overload and have a grid view of 10 at a time. Just choose whichever you like best! You can always use the forward and backward buttons to scroll through all the available photos.

One important note is that due to commercial licensing agreements with Flickr, we can only show you images that users have appropriately copyrighted using Creative Commons as publicly available.

You can read more about that here if you are interested: http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons. It is due to these restrictions that you may not find your own photos if you are trying to search for them. You can change your own license type to Attribution Creative Commons at http://www.flickr.com/account/prefs/license/?from=privacy to be able to view your photos through the widget, but be sure to understand which license type is right for you.

We hope you like flipping through cool photos as much as we do. As always, we would love to hear your feedback!

Learn more about the other cool things you can do with the Favorite Widgets experience.