Firetop

A three week holiday from blogging and I’m back, it didn’t really start out as the plan but became a necessity when I took on rather a lot of work launching a new website for a Firetop client, overhauling a whole site for another, and finally getting the next Firetop Ltd project rolling. Yesterday I attended rather a good 1-day conference at Brighton’s Corn Exchange called ‘Widgety Goodness‘ - an odd sounding title I suppose if you’re not familiar with widgets in a ‘non-A-level economics’ / ‘non beer-drinking’ sense. Essentially it covered the onward march of the mini-applications used by people within Social Networks like Facebook, and custom home pages like iGoogle to define themselves and/or access relevant content from web publishers.

As we stand at the forefront of what is predicted to be something quite revolutionary in terms of Internet usage (A ‘Darwinian Disco’), I couldn’t help but be reminded of the first few excellent Search Engine Strategies Conferences I attended in 2000/01, before everybody started jumping on the bandwagon and they sold out to Jupiter Media. What was covered at Widgety Goodness? Here are a few of the questions asked and answered directly and indirectly by speakers throughout the day’s presentations:

1. What exactly is a widget - how do we define them?
2. Will widgets change the way people use the Internet and result in fewer destination sites being visited?
3. How can widgets be made available for multiple platforms (Facebook, OpenSocial, Vista etc.)
4. What user needs do widgets address?
5. How can publishers and agencies take advantage of widgets?
6. Are widgets a direct response mechanism or a branding / engagement tool?
7. Is anybody actually making money from widgets?

To summarise we can say that a widget is an application which people use to either show something on a public profile about themselves, or to retrieve useful data from a third party source without having to visit the actual source itself. Clearly this will result in fewer visits to destination sites but not fewer hits on the data - in fact probably more as the ‘viral’ nature of widgets sees them taken up elsewhere, a bit like RSS readers. Some companies like WidgetAvenue are packaging widgets so that they can be installed on multiple platform types.

Companies are trying to get their brands distributed in the widget phenomenon by sponsoring ‘useful’ widgets or ‘expression’ widgets, but struggling to get any direct engagement unless they are publishing really useful ’sticky’ data - mainly in the B2C arena - think music videos. The music video widget described by musestorm’s presenter really didn’t seem to me to be anything more than a viral rich media banner - giving the same level of engagement metrics that one might find with Eyewonder or Pointroll.

During the morning’s sessions I felt very much that Widgets offered / will offer something interesting to publishers, but by the afternoon I felt a little like the hype was building a bit too much beyond the realms of the web techies’ fantasies. There was some debate about why Google have named their widgets ‘gadgets’ - “not everything needs to begin with a ‘G’” a speaker suggested… and whilst at lunch wandering the Brighton lanes I saw a lingerie adorned mannequin dummy in a sex shop window, below it a sign read ‘Gadgets for Girls’ - serving to further emphasise in my mind why ‘gadget’ is an inappropriate word.

Technorati Tags: widgety goodness, web 2.0, widgets, opensocial, gadgets, facebook, myspace, widgetavenue

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