Metafluence

Recap of the PDXWI October meeting on Widgetry

Kevin Tate from StepChange presenting Widgetry.

It was a good turn out of folks at the PDXWI meeting last night hosted by Nemo Design. StepChange made an engaging presentation on widgets that evolved into some great follow up discussion. I thought I already had a solid grasp on the widget trend, but I learned a few things and gained some clarity around a few more. My biggest take away is that widgets are not just a fad, but rather an important stratification of content and services that will reshape the future landscape of the web. Here are my notes:

Widget history

WeatherBug is considered the grandfather of widgets.

Facebook has now blocked the use of their name for AdWords ads promoting Facebook application development. Advertisers now use “F-book”.

In February of this year the keyword “widget” was $0.20 on Google’s AdWords

Places where widgets appear

Page mash ups (iGoogle, NetVibes, PageFlakes, etc.)

Blog add-ons

Pieces in a mash-up (Google maps API)

Web-based products (Meebo)

iPhone apps

Facebook applications

Types of widgets

Intelligent content containers. Can be as simple as an RSS feed.

Componentized applications.

Widget wisdom

Widgets address the fact that you can’t always drag a user to your site, but they may still want to interact with you. For example, I may not be willing to visit Sony Pictures website, but I’m very likely to watch the trailer for an upcoming movie on my friend’s MySpace page.

Context is huge. Contextually aware widgets that smartly adapt to the content and services around them are very powerful.

What distinguishes a widget from an interactive banner ad is choice and portability. Widgets are designed to be portable for the purpose of open adoption and distribution.

Statistics are a problem right now. It’s difficult to know what kind of exposure and usage your widgets are getting when you’re not sure if hits are part of a data pipeline that is caching on someone’s server or if it’s a human visitor on a host’s site.

Widget development tips

Know how it fails. You don’t want to have an error message on the host’s site. If it’s not working, make it disappear.

They need high availability. They tend to have much higher traffic demands. If they don’t require a session, turn sessions off. Use good caching strategies.

Minimum code on the client side. Don’t want to and can’t rely on the host to redeploy an undated version.

It’s good etiquette to wait for the page to finish loading before using client processing.

There are widget development frameworks such as Wildfire and NetVibes.

Widget fallout

Widgets are disruptive to the advertising industry. The main problem is a loss of control. Advertisers don’t have control over the context of an ad’s placement. They don’t know who else they are competing with on a page to know what kind of exclusivity value they can charge.

Content portals that have an ad supported revenue model like their widgets to pull in traffic, but the don’t want to share their real estate with other widgets.

Attendees at this month’s PDXWI meeting on widgets shared a tangential discussion on influence of mob rule on recommendation engines, how to filter the crowd, and the importance of editors/mavens.

We had some great tangential conversations about crowd recommendation vs. expert editors. It was actually a great lead in to next month’s PDXWI meeting on attention data featuring folks from Attensa, a Portland-based enterprise RSS firm. Paul mentioned APML in our discussion, so I know I’ll be asking Attensa what they think about it.

A big thanks to Dave Allen from Nemo for making the space available and providing some good Widmer beer on tap.. Also, if you attended last night’s meeting, I’d love to get everyone’s contact information (perhaps by leaving a comment on this post) to keep the discussions going. :)