Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus.
We have written extensively
about widgets here at Read/WriteWeb because widgets offer a new, byte-size way to expose and consume online content. Widgets are really a win-win for all. Content providers and developers can instantly send their content
to many sites, while bloggers and portals can benefit from syndicated, richer content on their
pages. And as widgets are becoming more and more ubiquitous, end users become
more comfortable with widgets and the provided content.
There is clearly money to be made in the widget space, which is why it has been getting a lot of attention. Richard wrote an overview of the space back in June and I profiled Widgetbox, a market place for widget developers and widget consumers, during DEMOfall. Today we write about a newcomer, a company called ClearSpring, and their innovation in the widget space.
Clearspring, currently in preview, is working on widget technologies for widget developers. The company asked not to share any visuals of their offering until they launch in January, but was open about their plans. They have explained their strategy in terms of three major components:
Engadget is providing superb
coverage of the Apple World Wide Developer Conference, currently in progress in San
Francisco. I'll zero in on the bit that interested me the most - one of my hobby horses,
widgets (mini web apps).
At the conference Apple said there are currently 2500 widgets in Dashboard. They announced two enhancements to that today.
Firstly Dashcode, which is a visual editor for HTML and CSS - enabling you to modify templates to produce widgets ("we have templates for RSS, podcasts, images, whatever you're looking for.").
The second new feature is Web Clip (same name as Google's Gmail RSS feature). Apple's Web Clip enables you to "turn any part of a Web page into a Widget".
The summary: "With Dashcode, we have a way for developers to more easily create widgets and with Web Clip, we can turn any piece of any Web page into a Widget."
Sounds excellent and shows once again that Apple is right on top of the user experience, as both of these features make it easy to create relatively complex mini web apps for your desktop. Om Malik thinks the web-connected widgets (and what isn't web connected these days!) will be "a bandwidth-using application", but the reality is that's where widgets are headed. Both desktop and Web - and in the near future connected to a whole host of Internet devices too. e.g. TV, music players, even the proverbial future fridge. I can't wait till that sort of widget connectivity becomes more common.
Photo via Engadget
With the
launch of Microsoft's blogging and social networking platform, Windows Live Spaces (formally MSN Spaces), there has
been an increase in interest around gadgets - i.e. mini web apps. People can add gadgets
into their Spaces site and Microsoft is starting to promote this feature heavily. Jay
Fluegel of Microsoft has written
a post to encourage developers to create gadgets for the Live Spaces platform. He
wrote:
"...a big part of joining the Windows Live family today is support for web gadgets written by anyone including YOU! Thanks to the great work done on Gadgets to date, you can now write a gadget that works both in Live.com (personalized portal) and Spaces (online expression/identity). And, it only takes one person adding it to their space for your gadget to become popular -- visitors to that space can choose "Add to your space" or "Add to Live.com" right from the header of the gadget, then visitors to that space can add to their spaces, and it's off to the races!"
Gadgets are a way for external
developers to get their apps onto the large Windows Live "family" of services - which drives usage and increases mindshare. This is what I call a real ecosystem at
work, because Windows Live Spaces (and live.com, the personalized start page) is a
platform that external developers can leverage to their advantage. It basically gives
small developers access to a mass market, so it makes sense to put your app on there and
potentially gain mass exposure. The same argument applies to doing a gadget/widget for
MySpace or Google's platform, although MySpace doesn't really make it easy to leverage
their platform.
I also like the guidelines Fluegel gives to potential Spaces Live gadget developers: make gadgets customizable, make them "reflective of the author's personality" [i.e. the Spaces user], and make sure it fits lots of different designs and themes. That old Web maxim: develop for the user first.
Details on developing gadgets for Live can be found at the Windows Live Dev site. Note that I've had some feedback from developers that Live gadgets are a lot harder to code than Google's gadgets. When I wrote about Google's gadget platform, Coogy developer Robert Yeager left this comment:
"In developing gadgets for Cooqy, our eBay search engine, we were able to have a Google gadget ready in about 5 minutes, but the Microsoft Live.com version took 5 hours! Oh, and the Microsoft version of our gadget doesn't work on Firefox!"
Microsoft's Mike Torres (from the Live Spaces team) replied in my comments:
"We're working pretty hard to have a consistent Live.com, Spaces, Windows Vista development story for mini applications. And of course, reducing the barrier to adoption by making it easier."
For more info on Live Spaces gadgets, the LiveSide blog has a podcast which explores the gadgets more with Jay Fluegel.
Finally, if you're a Live Spaces user, here are instructions to start adding gadgets to your page.
Widgets (aka gadgets, modules) are mini web apps that you can plug in to a
webpage or site such as MySpace, or a personalized start page like Netvibes or live.com.
Widgets are becoming more and more important on the Web, so I thought I'd spend a few
posts looking more closely at them.
Let's start with Google widgets, which they used to call modules but are now calling gadgets (curiously, a case where Google has copied Microsoft). Google offers two types of gadgets:
1) Desktop plug-ins - for the Google Desktop. Much like Yahoo's Konfabulator widget platform and Apple Dashboard.
2) Personalized Homepage gadgets. Google has gradually increased the number of widgets in their directory, but there are third party sites that offer a great selection too - e.g. here and here.
Google gadgets can also run in Google Pages, their webpage-editing tool.
To develop gadgets for the Google platform, use the Google Gadgets API - which Google claims is "so easy to use that you can develop your first gadget in 5 minutes". They also say it's easy to turn existing web content into a gadget.
The main difference between Google's and Microsoft's gadgets is that Google takes a web-centric approach, whereas Microsoft gadgets will utilize both desktop and web. I'll look more closely at Microsoft's gadgets in my next widgets post.
Wufoo
is a new web app that enables users to create their own web forms. I have to disclaim
that Kevin Hale, the guy who re-designed my blog,
is one of the people behind Wufoo - so I'm somewhat biased in writing about it. But to
balance that, I'll also mention other companies who have developed similar web apps.
With Wufoo you can create your own online form and integrate it within your blog or website, or create a separate form page (which you can style). Other features include ability to email the form to people, RSS feeds to track usage, and a Report Manager. The process to create a form is very simple and it took me just a few minutes to create a test form, which I've copied and pasted below. There's lot's of Ajaxy goodness to make the process smooth and whizzy, but more importantly the end result is a useful one for website owners and bloggers. Here's my test questionaire, embedded into my blog (hopefully - I can't tell if it's working or not until I press 'publish'):
Update: It does work, but clicking 'Submit' takes the user away from my blog page. Also it'd be cool to have results automatically updated and displayed on this page.
Update 2: I've put the form on a separate page, because it was causing some display issues on my homepage.
Wufoo's business plan is subscriptions and by the looks of their page of examples, they're targeting everyone from software developers (for bug tracking) to mainstream website owners (e.g. create a wedding registration form). It's interesting to read how Wufoo came about - it was a product of Paul Graham's Y Combinator program for statups. Wufooer Chris Campbell wrote a useful post about the experience, entitled The Top 10 Questions Investors Asked Us.
Wufoo is the latest in a line of recent services that make building interactive Web apps easy. There are a number of new widget-builders - Snipperoo, PostApp are two that I've noted recently. Also Phil Sim launched WyaCracker in April.
In terms of online form builders, in addition to Wufoo there's The Form Assembly and JotForm (that I'm aware of). Also let's not forget the larger-scale DIY web app builders, like Ning, JotSpot, Ning, Zoho Creator, Dabble DB, DataMashups.com.
Overall, it's all part of a larger trend for web-based services that make creating interactive applications easy as pie - a great sign for the mainstreaming of Web20.
Earlier this week I noted that widget services are really ramping up now. Indeed over the past couple of days I've noticed lots of action in the burgeoning widgets industry, plus some excellent commentary.
At the Connected Innovators program at Supernova last night PostApp revealed the high level of WidgetBox, its "web widget marketplace". It's basically a marketplace for developing and managing widgets (i.e. small web-based apps). It aims to bring together the programmatic and participative Webs, in the words of CEO Ed Anuff. In other words, it's a marketplace between developers and regular Web users - where WidgetBox sits in the middle. TechCrunch has a review, plus profiles another company called GoodStorm which is doing e-commerce within widgets.
There are other services popping up to manage widgets too, e.g. Snipperoo which I mentioned in my prior post. The possibilities of widgets seems endless right now. Susan Mernit mentioned another angle on this, that the intersection of widgets with structured data is an area ripe with opportunity:
"Widgets could be flavor of the moment, but the ways that some widgets intersect with structured data (as opposed to intersecting with flashy, AJAX DHTML fancy effects) is one of the things I find compelling (Yes, I am fascinated by microformats, in particular)."
Susan says this opens up the ability to embed mini-apps in hugely popular platforms like MySpace. Over time I expect the big media companies will enable this kind of functionality in their platforms too - e.g. BBC, Yahoo (who already have all pieces of the puzzle, with its Konfabulator product and media platforms). For a taste of what Yahoo can do on a large scale, check out the NewsGator Podcasts & Buzz app - which searches RSS feeds to find video and audio podcasts, plus buzzworthy stories, and allows you to view that within Yahoo! Messenger with Voice. That kind of mini-app within an app is where all this is headed, from a product perspective. The bigger picture is that it opens up more opportunities for developers to leverage others platforms, and users to get more and varied sources of content.
Paul Kedrosky points
to a new service called PostApp, which is a new
widgets syndication service currently in private beta. While the sign-up page doesn't go
into detail about what PostApp does, Fergus Burns from Nooked has an interesting
post on this subject:
"A new space is beginning to develop - widget marketing.
Led initially be desktop widget services such as konfabulator, we are now seeing tons of services supporting widgets/gadgets - especially in social media applications (typepad, wordpress, myspace, aimpages, netvibes, etc).
I've noted some recent startup activity specifically @ widgets - Snipperoo, PostApp, Tagworld, and a mobile widget venture from Nokia Labs, called Widsets.
All these startups are going to make "widget" placements in social media services easy - rather than the current "html/javascript" hacking - watch out for tons of innovation."
Note: Nooked is one of my clients.
I too have been tracking the growing importance of widgets, especially as it relates to the Personalized Start Pages space - Microsoft Live gadgets, Google's modules, Netvibes and Pageflakes, and of course Yahoo's konfabulator (although not yet integrated in a big way into MyYahoo). As Fergus notes, widgets are spreading into many areas now - into blogging platforms like Typepad and Wordpress, social networking systems like MySpace and AIMPages, etc. And now there's a whole new segment growing - which Fergus nicely labels "widget marketing".
This is all being driven by the increasing use of microcontent and web services in all kinds of web-based services - such as Windows Live, MySpace and Wordpress. I used to talk a lot about the Two-Way Web as it relates to webpages - that people have the ability to publish their own blogs, interact with e-commerce sites such as Amazon, etc. Nowadays it's all about The Two-Way Web App! You can interact and 'write' to any number of small web services-driven apps. And aggregation services such as Netvibes and Pageflakes can pack as many of these mini-apps onto one page as you care to add.
Snipperoo is another widget service to watch out
for. It's a service to create and manage widgets - Ivan Pope is behind it. Also check out
Zenrob's post
on MySpace's widget strategy, where he suggests that deploying more widgets may be the
key to MySpace's monetization.
There's no doubt about it - widgets are are fast-growing area of innovation and I expect to see more companies like PostApp and Snipperoo popping up to take advantage of this trend.
