I believe that the widgetsphere has reached the end of its beginning. I saw a new widget today which proves to me that my vision for Personal Widgets serving as “data containers” is possible.
First, thank you and a hat tip to Lawrence Coburn at Sexy Widget. Lawrence wrote a great blog post yesterday titled, LinkedInABox Widget – What the LinkedIn Widget Should Look Like In it he wrote,
…A service called LinkedInABox has developed a JavaScript widget that does a nice job of capturing the key elements of your LinkedIn profile for display on your blog.
The LinkedInABox widget configuration tool lets you select a display name, the fields from your LinkedIn profile you would like to display (Summary, Education, Connections, Etc.), a color, and a background image. You can see my LinkedInABox widget in the right hand column.
What’s so cool about this? Why am I so excited? It’s cool and I am excited because I think that we can use this type of widget to capture, package, and display personal information from the dozens and dozens of user account pages we have scattered all over the web. One widget per relationship.
If we collect a bunch of these Personal Widgets together what we have is a new type of personal organizer. As I have written before, it’s this widget host platform which is still the missing piece.
I received an email today from Hilton Honors. I have an account on Hilton’s website. Here’s some information contained in the email:
Member Since: September 2006
HHonors # 9623…….
Point Balance: 1,040
Last Stay: September 30, 2006
Last Stay Hotel: Hampton Nashville Airport
Just as LinkedInABox did, Hilton HHonors should offer it members the ability to “roll their own” widget containing each user’s personal information.
In terms of business model, I believe that these types of Personal Widgets are the perfect platform through which the sponsor companies can each make special offers and communicate one-to-one with widget owners. Hilton HHonors can send me coupons for special promotions. Since the widget is pulling from Hilton’s database, their marketing folks can make real time offers.
Since the widget provides me with some real value as an organization tool I will be sure to pay attention to it when traveling. Think of this little widget as serving two functions. For the user it’s like a digital version of the plastic card Hilton gives each of its members but interactive. For Hilton, the widget is a direct pipeline to the user’s eyeballs (i.e. attention). Any information sent by Hilton to the user will be customized to that user’s profile.
Therefore, I think Lawrence’s second concern will take care of itself. he wrote,
“The second, and far more serious stumbling block, is the lack of control they have over their own destiny. This service is completely and utterly dependent on LinkedIn continuing to allow them access to the profile data.”
For LinkedIn, and all the other sponsor companies/organizations, the widget is a form of endorsement and advertising. Sure, the current iteration of the LinkedInABox widget is a bit visually bland but that can be easily fixed.
The key thing for me is that I have hundreds of these relationships. My university, golf club, professional organizations, subscriptions, car dealership, doctor, yoga studio, airlines, car rental, cable TV, cell phone, gas, water, sewer, mortgage company/landlord, software companies, stores, shops, lawyers, and on and on. We all have hundreds of relationships in our lives and no really good way to organize them. Widgets offer one solution. UPDATE: For each of the hundreds of relationships we will have one widget for each relationship.
The key thing for the sponsor companies is that they build and maintain one template and database which can be used by thousands of widget users.
One thing I haven’t touched upon but which I spoke to Brightcove about today was using these types of Personal Widgets as a platform to deliver highly customized videos from the companies themselves. Think of the widget as being a 3 dimensional cube with 6 sides. The LinkedInABox widget only has one side. This new widget would rotate and on one side would be a Brightcove video player. The widget owner could view video messages from the widget sponsor. The key to the value proposition in video is getting people to opt-in to give you their focused attention. That’s hard. I think these Personal Widgets offer so much value to the user that they have the leverage to deliver commercial video to an interested viewer. Each widget is a personalized channel that the widget sponsor controls.
I would love for someone to take the same javascript code that the guys at LinkedInABox created and apply it to their local Hollywood Video membership card with some personal information stored on the widget (for extra credit take that personal data and create a custom bar code for that data).
UPDATE: Perhaps these types of Personal Widgets are what can make the vision of a truly distributed Digital Lifestyle Aggregator (DLA) a reality.
