This WidgetsLive panel featured Adam Sah from Google Personalized Homepage, Sanaz Ahari from Microsoft's Live.com, and Tariq Krim from Netvibes. After the usual product intros, the panel got more interesting with conversations steered by Niall Kennedy (the moderator).
Niall started by asking about monetization. Sanaz said that being a homepage for Microsoft properties is key for them, rather than making money as a standalone product by advertising. Adam said it's similar at Google and they want to drive traffic to their properties via the start page.
In terms of how they're driving users to their start pages, Tariq said that their growth is viral. Sanaz said that for Microsoft, giving users the choice of lots of content and pointing them to directories is important - which gives live.com utility for users. Adam said that Google tries "not to play favorites" [with the widgets they display] and they want to enable discovery - like in search.
I'm here
at Widgets Live in San Francisco, where Dan Strauss and Don Synstelien
from Fox Interactive Media are onstage talking about their new widget platform called SpringWidgets. The defining feature of this
product is that it works on both the desktop (like Konfabulator) and in the
browser (like Google widgets). However the desktop part is Windows only for now - Mac
support is coming.
Their showcase widget currently is the RSS Reader widget - it displays rss feeds, video and podcasts. If you have a Feedburner feed, you can customize your widget, which came about as a result of a partnership between FIM and Feedburner. SpringWidgets has a developer platform too, so the platform is flexible for publishers and developers alike.
The other defining feature is that SpringWidgets can be easily shared - users can click a small green icon (the widgets equivalent to the orange 'subscribe' button) and put the widget either on their website/blog, social network (e.g. MySpace), their desktop, or all of the above.
