Lawrence Coburn (Sexy Widget) has written an interesting blog post titled, Some Thoughts on Widget Distribution.
I think that the widget galleries have put the cart before the horse in their quest to centralize the distribution of widgets on each of their respective platforms. The situation is analogous to the difference between MyBloglog and MySpace. One’s distributed, the other is centralized.
I find that as I am surfing the web I will come across a new website and notice that it has a MyBlogLog widget in its sidebar. I almost always click through and check out the person and if I like the blog I add it to my collection of blog communities. Hardly ever, do I go to MySpace and cruise around looking for new blogs to read or people to meet. Discovery happens in a distributed manner.
Widget galleries, like Widgetbox, Snipperoo, Musestorm, and Widgipedia are spinning their wheels because while they are attracting various widget producers none have gone viral in the ability to attract widgets users. I believe that this situation is a result of the fact that people discover widgets “out in the wild” while surfing the internet (much like I discover new blogs).
Users either see a widget on someone else’s blog and think, “That’s cool, I want one” or they are using a web service which offers them a widget to use on their blog/webpage. Widget galleries (directories) in fundamentally flawed. Even if they could attract ALL the widget producers, they still will struggle to get people to come to their galleries and check-out new widgets.
The result of this current model is that most widget galleries/directories (see list above) have focused almost all of their time on perfecting the smooth exporting of widgets from their platforms to the host website/blog. While interesting, it’s unfortunately irrelevant. What’s much more important is finding ways of allowing folks to do one-click importing of widgets from either another widget host or from the widget producers themselves. That’s kind of what Fred Wilson was talking about in his blog post Why Embed Code Matters.
If users can seamlessly and easily (one-click) import those widgets they come across “in the wild,” then I believe we will see an explosion in the adoption and usage of widgets. At the same time that you make it easier to import widgets in the wild, you also need to provide widget users a tool with which to organize their widget collections.
Interestingly, the desktop itself is NOT the answer when it comes to offering widget users a good way to organize their widget collections. In fact, one of the biggest complaints I have with desktop widgets is that they are a mess on my desktop (specifically my Dashboard).
To effectively organize one’s widgets s/he needs a way to arrange them by type through the use of tags (keywords) and also a way to visually organize the widgets. I think the use of thumbnails is the current best way to visually display the widgets.
I would suggest the de.icio.us is the biggest competitor to the current group of widget directories. Del.icio.us essentailly has created an complete ecosystem for managing bookmarks (i.e. URLs). Well, think about it for a moment, why should URLs be so much different from embed code? Widgets are at their most basic, little snippets of embed code (HTML, Javascript, or Flash). When thinking about del.icio.us simply replace the URL object with the embed code object in your mind.
basically, each record in the database would be a blank html box which could be tagged with a keyword and into which embed code could be pasted. The size of the htlm box could be adjusted depending on the widget.
I think we should take a step back and perhaps revisit the possibility of using a javascript browser bookmarklet as a way to achieve this one-click importing of widgets in our hosted widget collections.
Lots to ponder. We are getting closer. More to come later………….. What are your thoughts? Specifically, what do the widget directories think?
PLEASE NOTE: I willing be changing my blogs feed address to the following:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/timothypost
Please change this RSS address in your feed reader (Thanks)
PS: One final thought. iTunes might be the best mental model to think about with respect to widgets. While people do discover music, movies, TV shows INSIDE of iTunes, much more discovery takes place in the wild. iTunes has enbaled various content producers to put a little “Import into iTunes” button on their websites. iTunes then empowers people to organize their media collections inside iTunes.
This is EXACTLY what’s needed in the widgetsphere!!
