Widgetizing the Web
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Written By Kate Zimmermann | October 5, 2006 | Share This
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When It Rains, It Pours
…And yesterday the internet flooded with WIDGETS. Yes, those handy interactive icons that characterize 2.0 and confuse the heck out of your mom — Google calls them “Gadgets for Your Webpage”, aka: “miniature-sized objects that offer cool and dynamic content that can be placed on any page on the web.” They have a full directory of ‘gadgets’, including PacMan, Wikipedia, iTunes, Horoscopes, Optical Illusions (as if the web wasn’t schitzo enough), a Slang Translator, and my favorite, the Terror Alert Level As Expressed By Sesame Street Characters!!! (today we’re at “Ernie/Bert”). Some of them are pretty bizarre…. The Mix-a-Pol let you mix faces of popular politicians, the “Big Lebowski Quote Generator” is exactly what it says, as is “Totally Free Crap”, and “Mormon Thought of the Day.” There are 1220 pages of these things, so I’m gonna stop listing them now.
“But we want more, MORE!”
Nokia has also released WidSets for your mobile phone. (Widgets, Gadgets, Widsets…) If you’ve got Java, you could be checking blogs & forums, sports, games, transportation updates, travel, weather, and the rest of the Internet through shiny square buttons on your cell phone. Now, if I could only get out of that 2-year-old contract…
4X The Fun
Working in a similar realm, AOL is attempting to win back old customers with the beta launch of AOL OpenRide. OpenRide lets users access their web browser, messenger, media, and email from a single window. The “Quad View” shows all 4 at once, rather than using a ‘tabbed’ separation (a la Firefox). While not exactly in widget form, AOL’s new browser is one more solution for the growing demand to consolidate the web. Site widgets, RSS aggregators, customizable homepages, and now OpenRide are all examples of how different web services are approaching the hefty task of organizing information in a single space without overwhelming the user. All other sites, in the meantime, are focusing on how to become better providers of that content as it feeds to a million little points of aggregation. Online marketers are already starting to talk about ‘visibility’, ‘engagement’, ‘subscriptions’, and ‘interaction’ as metrics for the success of a site’s off-page content. See Charlene Li’s very interesting post about how to calculate the ROI of social media.
While Google, Nokia and AOL aren’t exactly innovators of online widgets (see: Rollyo, Flickr, NetVibes, del.icio.us, etc), they are three big names adopting a pretty techie concept. We’ll see if this means a tipping point for the widgetized web, or if Google’s Gadgets fade away like another A9 into the cybertrash of useless apps.
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