Comments on: Widget mania run amok?

By: akela

akela — Fri, 11 May 2007 18:51:01 +0000

Good post OM. Widgets are getting crazy. Its the same story with extensions and what not. Theres too much exuberance in the market :). Did you know that one can fill up firefox with extensions on all sides just so that a person can twitter. Theres an interesting picture over here:

http://ltips.blogspot.com/2007/05/how-i-went-from-twittering-to.html

By: Deirdre Molloy

Deirdre Molloy — Fri, 11 May 2007 17:57:00 +0000

And don't forget Widget Week starting next week in London. Should be a very interesting series of discussions and there will be podcast afterwards from the Chinwag Live Media Widgetised event on May 16th.

By: Martin Lawrence

Martin Lawrence — Fri, 11 May 2007 10:53:19 +0000

with the discussion focussing mostly on Web-Widgets, what about desktop widgets? An unauthorized Vista Gadget which links into our service was downloaded more than 30.000 times. That is, without us doing anything to promote it.

Of course, an advertising-widget on the desktop (which is my property) is a somewhat more delicate matter than one on a visited webpage (which is foreign property).

However, I assume that appropriate adverts (say, an interstitial) could work nicely.

By: Arun

Arun — Fri, 11 May 2007 04:07:29 +0000

Om, I thought you were a "widget bull". Are you now turning bear?

By: Krish

Krish — Thu, 10 May 2007 20:58:28 +0000

I wouldn't dismiss the widget ads all together. It is in the beginning stages and both the widgets and market has to mature. Only then we can say whether it is a success or failure. Didn't we dismiss web ads in the same way few years back?

By: Graeme Thickins

Graeme Thickins — Thu, 10 May 2007 18:23:11 +0000

Business models in the world of widgets will happen, guaranteed. The difference lately is that people are realizing widgets can be ads -- i.e., a way to grab some of the $20B online ad spend, even if it's just a sliver of what Google gets from its own mega-ad-widget business, AdSense. What's raising the noise level substantially is Google announcing it will do a full launch this summer of its "Gadget Ads"...which have been aptly called "WidgetSense."

There was a good discussion about widget companies and platforms on this blog post yesterday: World Wide Web of Widgets on Read/Write Web. Say that fast three times... :-)

By: Ty Graham

Ty Graham — Thu, 10 May 2007 17:32:40 +0000

bingo @ dave

By: Michael

Michael — Thu, 10 May 2007 17:14:16 +0000

Some great points in the article for sure, especially the points about what kinds of widgets are the ones built to last.

However, I do not think the number of widgetbox subscribers is a particularly good barometer of the success or failure of a particular web site.

For example: Sudoku Park has 850ish widgetbox subscribers, but they don't even rank in the top 100,000 on alexa.

Twitter Badge has 250ish widgetbox subsribers, but twitter is one of the hottest sites on the web, ranked 850 on alexa with millions of subscribers.

By: Jay (living in First Life)

Jay (living in First Life) — Thu, 10 May 2007 17:05:36 +0000

Widgets are extremely hard to monetize. I stil think Photobucket was extremely overvalued. The power belongs to the owner of the traffic/membership so that's at least why Photobucket had some value because of all the photos stored. There are very few other categories where people have so much vested in a widget.

By: raspeball

raspeball — Thu, 10 May 2007 16:55:51 +0000

And you don´t think that you, a blog about everything hip and web-two-y about web startups, mentioning widgets and linking to sites with new widgets, has anything to do with it ? Search your own site.