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.

By: dave mcclure

dave mcclure — Thu, 10 May 2007 16:37:38 +0000

valid point & i agree... however, just as a quick reminder that not all widgets require and/or target visible space on the desktop or the browser.

"widgets" in general are simply componentized apps that enable modular integration of multiple website & services.

some require visual real estate, others may not. this might be a technical nit, but i think the point i'm making is that using widgets for distribution doesn't always require cluttering up limited user range of field (but probably for a lot of stuff, you're correct).

By: Michael

Michael — Thu, 10 May 2007 15:43:30 +0000

I think the money comment is "A Last.fm widget on my blog, or a little twitter widget (as used by Martin) and Slide.com’s slide shows on MySpace are very different from Mpire.com’s commercial widgets. These are precisely the widgets that are built to last, and have worked well as audience-boosting and branding tools."

Widgets are entertainment and not commerical except for adsense. The ecosystem and platform vendors like Gigya and springwidgets will need to work the business model a little more.

By: W.B. McNamara

W.B. McNamara — Thu, 10 May 2007 15:33:17 +0000

It's more than just the past few days: for amusement value I slapped together widgetbubble.com a couple of months ago.

It's really just a couple of technorati charts tracking widget mentions, but amusing to watch...the increase in widget mentions over the last 360 days is awe-inspring.

By: Danny

Danny — Thu, 10 May 2007 15:15:53 +0000

Bingo, Om. IMHO the central problem is that widgets are designed to attact casual users but are only spread virally by publishers. If Joe User sees a shiny widget on a blog and he thinks “I want,” he’s out of luck because he doesn’t have a blog, start page or MySpace profile. Break web widgets free from the shackles of the web publishing milieu and with it you throw away the limited real estate, slow page loads and limited audience that is holding back true viral adoption.

By: Nathan Burke

Nathan Burke — Thu, 10 May 2007 15:11:27 +0000

Excellent points here. When I first started looking at widgets I saw two distinct types: 1) widgets that existed solely as a new way to advertise something without being useful (like a countdown to the launch of Spiderman 3) and 2) widgets that provide a unique value. And since desktop real estate is something valuable to users, you really have to do something different for users to take the time to install and use your widget.