Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Welcome to the Widgets web

It started innocent, I came across widgetbox and said sure I can write a widget. 7 Blidgets, 2 remote SWF widgets, and 2 social shout out widgets later I was wondering more about widgets. (Obligatory link to wikipedia). So did a little digging and found the following ( this is what I found, let me know if there is more )

  • 9 Platforms for widgets
  • 3 main technologies for web widgets
  • 10 desktop widget systems
  • 12 Million in funding I can find,
  • 2 Companies internally funding platforms (Fox and Vendio)
  • Mark Cuban funded one of them (undisclosed amount)
  • Mobile widget providers are popping up (found 3 but did not look that hard)
  • W3C? is driving a standard for this
  • 2 Widget conferences

And I found one great post which lays the whole thing out.

My Take I have not written widgets yet for all the platforms, though I think the simplicity of widgetbox enables creation, distrubtion, management with just knowledge of the basics (html and/or javascript). Want to go deeper then write some flash. I am impressed with yourminis, but not so much for the widget platform, rather for the potential of a "Social Desktop".

Most of the folks in this space are concentrating (at least from my perspective) on the ad network, I am not sure if the intention is to be the ad network or be the a channel for the ad network and claim a slice of the pie. They each seem to promote the number of widgets deployed, which I guess represents the amount of web-space they have access to. Bigger your network bigger your valuation. It also seems their biggest distribution is the blogging universe and the social platforms likes facebook/myspace. Myspace has SpringWidgets? , Yahoo has widgets, Google has theirs, MS has theirs, Apple has something, and note for most of these there is not only a widget concept but a layer which enables you to integrate closer to their core platform. I would expect (probably already exists) a widget platform which has default integration with MyFace? and one which is focused on 'mashups', maybe a QED-Mashup-Widget-Maker. I figure that a good exit for these companies would be acquisition by a core social or similar platform, widgets are important to a platform (because they offer front sidemulti-sided market platform dynamics). There is definitely one platform / company which is seems to resonate across all widget makers, "Adobe, all your widgets are belong to us."

I am by far not an expert on widgets, just writing my impressions so far.

Widgets I wrote, writing, or just playing with

WidgetBoxWidgetsIWrote

List of widget based Systems

Widget Platforms

Widgets Tech

  • HTML
  • FLASH
  • JAVA

Common Desktop Widget Systems

Mobile Widget Systems

Browser Extension

Standards for Widgets

Widget Conference

Widget Business Model conversations and observations

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4 comments:

Editor said...

What search terms exactly did you use to gather all your widget info?
and how do I get my lowly blog about widgets to show up on these searches? It's been an uphill battle from day one!
widgetslab.com

July 26, 2007 at 10:43 AM
Unknown said...

Just the basic terms nothing special and your blog did come up in some of the searches.

July 26, 2007 at 11:15 AM
Anonymous said...

it's the 1990's again!

August 21, 2007 at 4:28 PM
Unknown said...

That's the truth, we just rinse-repeat and reapply ;)

August 21, 2007 at 4:31 PM

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