There are a lot of widgets that I use that I acquire and consume for my own personal purposes. For example, I have a variety of Dashboard Widgets, like Radar In Motion (one of my favorites, especially in the summer south) that are for very personal purposes. I invoke them on my Mac, use them, and then put them away. Because these widgets satisfy a very personal need, I call these “Me Widgets.” With a very broad brush, you can classify all the desktop (Apple, Yahoo, Microsoft), mobile (Widsets, ZenZui, S60, iPhone), and webtop (iGoogle, NetVibes, PageFlakes, FreeWebs) widgets as Me Widgets. Hybrid webtop/desktop widgets (YourMinis, Springwidgets) also fit in this category.

Then there are widgets that are primarily used by one individual to share content with others who visit their blogs, social networking profile pages, and other websites or web pages. For example, Flickr widgets that display your photostreams in your sidebar are popular across blogs and social networks. As a user/publisher, you love the ease of use of adding Flickr to your site, but the primary purpose of the widget is to share those photos with other people. I call this category “We Widgets” because I acquire the widget, but others primarily consume it. We Widgets include the broad group of web widgets, like those served up by WidgetBox and others for use on Typepad, WordPress, Blogger, MySpace and other sites. All of the sidebar content blocks on idgetsWay are widgets, and would be considered We Widgets.

Of course, there are some widgets that can be both Me Widgets and We Widgets as well, and some that sound the same but work just differently enough that the versions are distinctly Me or We. A package tracker, for example, would seem to be a Me Widget, but if you run an intranet, other internal site, a blog about logistics, or a site with office/shipping related content, you might very well publish a package tracker on your site, making it a We Widget. Or, take the Yahoo Flickr Widget, which is inherently personal and therefore a Me Widget, or the Flickr Slideshow from Widgetbox, which is more of a We Widget allowing you to share photos with visitors to your site.

In some future post, I’ll explore the differences in benefits to content owners of We Widgets versus Me Widgets.

Technorati Tags: widget, gadget

Several readers have emailed to ask about quantification of the widget market, and as I’ve told them, I’m not sure that reliable data is possible today. There is still so much activity in this nascent market that it is hard to define, much less quantify. Clearspring, WidgetBox and other widget companies can provide their own statistics, and Niall Kennedy was doing analysis of Google Gadgets, but these numbers are unique to those companies. Aggregate data will be difficult if not impossible to come by. Now that I’ve got a bit of time, I’ll explore this topic further and post my findings.

Technorati Tags: widget, gadget, Clearspring, Widgetbox, Google

The widget ecosystem might have attracted a lot of money and attention, but not many users. If you checked out WidgetBox, a good proxy for the ecosystem, a typical popular widget has about 300-to-500 subscribers. And amongst those that are popular, they are the ones, which have an element of personal expression.

Om’s analysis is typically very insightful, but this falls short of what widgets are all about. The widget ecosystem is much larger than web widgets for blogs, social networks, and webtop applications like iGoogle and Netvibes. As Danny wrote in the comments, its critical to think of widgets from a consumer point of view (Joe User), and how they interact with digital products.

Desktop widgets allow interfaces with web-based applications, so as more users move to webtop apps like Google Apps, Zoho, etc., widgets provide a means for quick updates and retrievals of common or important content and functionality. Desktop widgets also allow users to customize their interaction with their computers in ways they could not easily do before.

Widgets are also far better at delivering internet content to mobile devices, like the forthcoming weather widget for Apple’s iPhone. Navigation and interaction are simplified, the user interface is optimized for small screens, and views refresh more quickly, as the heavy lifting (UI rendering and other functions) are done on the device.

It is clear that widgets as we currently think about them have some key challenges to overcome. As Om and readers point out, there are only so many blogs and social profiles, and space on those pages is at a premium. And there are only so many users with the temerity to make widgets work. But widgets are in their infancy, and the User Tri-fecta (usefulness, usability and value) is possible. There is no doubt in my mind that widgets will play a huge role in the future of digital products, allowing users to very easily define their digital experiences to suit their needs.

Technorati Tags: widgets, gadgets, WidgetBox, Om Malik, GigaOm, iGoogle, NetVibes, Zoho, iPhone

• Clearspring serves 3 billionth widget, and the company is now serving 60 million widgets per day.
• Google brands its personalized “gadgetized” homepage as “iGoogle.” I’ll have more to say about this later.
• Google was busy in widgets. They also announced Gadget Ads, widgets in ad-standard sizes and delivered through their advertising platform. Niall wrote a really good post about this development.
• Another of the big Internet companies, eBay also got busy with widgets, launching eBay To Go, a tool for creating widgets out of auction items. At first glance, these seem to be really well implemented.
• As reported by MacNN, Apple has filed patents dealing with how to run multiple instances of Dashboard, or collections of widgets.

I’ll attempt a more detailed analysis on each of these in the coming days.

Technorati Tags: widgets, gadgets, Clearspring, Google, iGoogle, Gadget Ads, eBay, eBay To Go, Apple, Dashboard

Technorati Tags: widgets, gadgets, tiles, desktop, webtop, nettop, pubtop, mobtop, Apple, Vista, Yahoo, FreeWebs, NetVibes, PageFlakes, YourMinis, Clearspring, WidgetBox, MySpace, Typepad, Blogger, WordPress, iPhone, S60, Opera

Many of the plug-ins are utility applications for managing Apple TV and QuickTime, like the ability to wake other computers via the local area network. Others still are really geeky, like Perlbin, which allows you to run Perl scripts. But several of the plugins might better be called widgets. These include file browser, RSS reader, weather forecast and sports scores. I’m not yet a beta tester (though I’m signing up), so I can’t yet report on how easy or hard it is to install the Loader, or on the actual use of these widgets.

But I can absolutely see a market for these widgets, paricularly a few that make sense in the home media environment. Weather is a perfect example. While listening to my iTunes library over my home entertainment center via Apple TV, I might want to know tomorrow’s weather. Rather than waiting for my local forecast to appear on The Weather Channel, and rather than firing up my home computer to visit Weather.com, I could simply activate the weather widget on the Apple TV.

Other use cases are easy to imagine: After browsing through our movie library on Apple TV and not liking our choices, my family uses Apple TV’s out-of-the-box functionality to view a few movie trailers. We pick one we like, and activate a Showtimes widget that lists our local theaters, movies and showtimes. Take this use case to its logical conclusion, and we should be able to buy tickets to the movie we want to see, right through the widget, courtesy of Fandango or another movie ticket purveyor.

It would not surprise me to see official Dashboard widgets for the Apple TV in the near future. In fact, I’m a bit surprise the company hasn’t provided them already, as it would seem to be a trivial software engineering feat via a simple software upgrade delivered over the Internet. They have already announced limited widget support for the iPhone, and both the iPhone and Apple TV run a modified version of Mac OS X. But Apple has its hands full with the upcoming releases of its iPhone and the desktop version Mac OS X, so it may be a simple matter of resource availability, product road mapping, or some other factors. In the meantime, you’ll have to be satisfied with the Awkward TV solution.

Whether Apple officially releases widgets for Apple TV or not, the bigger picture is the continuing proliferation of widgets into new uses, devices, media, and delivery methods such as Apple TV, Joost, Snap Shots, iPhone, S60 and so on. All manner of companies are realizing the power of allowing users to have greater control in defining their own personal digital experiences.

Technorati Tags: widgets, gadgets, tiles, Apple, Apple TV, Mac OS X, iPhone, AwkwardTV, Joost, Snap, Snap Shots, S60

Widgetbox yesterday announced Showcase pages (when I was creating this post, Widgetbox.com was unavailable) which feature all of the Widgetbox widgets for a particular content owner, such as AOL.

Yesterday, Snap relegated SPA to an also-ran,making it but one of eight initial Snap Shots, an enhanced version of the service. Snap Shots are similar in functionality (rollover previews of content referenced in a link), but are far more precise in delivering contextual content. Instead of simply showing the preview of a site–which is now handled by PreviewShot (formerly SPA), Snap Shots feature more detailed content, like Wikipedia entries, stock quotes for publicly traded companies, and film industry details from IMDB. Some are more interesting than others, like the PhotoShot, which displays a single photo from a Flickr photostream plus Previous and Next controls.

If Snap can scale the number of Snap Shots available, this service has promise.

• It could potentially provide users with far more useful information, which may mitigate some of the annoyance or hassle factor. But website owners need to be careful not to overdo it; I’ve visited pages on which its impossible to move my mouse without invoking SPA.
• Like SPA, said useful information is provided contextually as a link in the text, rather than in a sidebar widget or some other format. This helps draw users attention and should increase the quality of content views.
• Also as with SPA, users can search the web directly from the rollover, if they have any interest in using Snap as their search engine.
• Website owners can reduce the amount of visual clutter on their pages that is often the direct result of the proliferation of widgets. (This is a topic I’m addressing in a post that’s taking way too long to write.)

Snap has made a few interesting choices with this new service, particularly the branding of the first few available Shots (in Snap parlance). As mentioned above, PhotoShot is specifically a Flickr Snap Shot, as “www.flickr.com” is included in the syntax for “calling the shots.” (If they didn’t or aren’t planning to use this phrase for marketing purposes, they should.) Why not Flickr Shot? It would seem that both Snap and Flickr would benefit from the brand associations. Or did Flickr simply get in early enough to claim the rights to the generic PhotoShot trademark? Or even pay for its rights? The same could be said for their other initial Shots as well. Another intriguing branding choice: “Snap Shots” uses a character space as a separator, which the sub-brands are mashed together to create one word with two initial caps.

At first glance, its hard to tell whether the URL structure for ProductShot can include affiliate links, which would ostensibly be a financial benefit for the provider ecosystem: site owner > Snap > Amazon. And while StockShot can be configured to display data from a wide variety of sources, the others appear to be limited to one source only. Its also not entirely clear whether Snap will control the development of all Snap Shots or will open the platform to external contributors. While Snap offers a Snap Shots Markup Language (SSML) for “hand coding,” a cursory review of the whitepaper appears to address only a limited amount of customization. Of course, PreviewSnap can display a preview of just about any site, but it has the same limitations that Snap acknowledges simply by releasing Snap Shots.

Publishing Snap Shots appears to be essentially the same as it was for SPA, and is supported by some of the most popular blogging platforms through plugins. And it has a page-based configuration tool to customize Shots with frame colors, presentation and interactivity (link, icon, both), logo, and size of preview, plus several advanced options for turning on or off search, internal links, external links, and all non-PreviewShots.

So will Snap Shots assist users in their quest to find what they want to find? Will they increase the value of a site through contextual content and interactivity? Will they drive traffic to Shot content providers or to Snap itself. Time will tell. But where I see a lot of similarity in widget delivery methods, this is an interesting, innovative approach at least.

Technorati Tags: widgets, Snap, Snap.com, Snap Shots, Snap Preview Anywhere

On the heels of last month’s launch of Zenzui–a Microsoft IP Ventures company–Nokia upped the ante in mobile widgets through its S60 platform for Symbian-based mobile devices. Nokia will offer a widget software development kit (SDK), allowing developers to create custom widgets to run on the S60 platform. The widgets will are purported to be based on web standards, and will supposedly make it easy to transition desktop widgets to the S60 mobile platform. The SDK will be available in Q3 2007.

The announcement about mobile widget support on S60 includes a note that widgets for S60 will be distributed through various channels, including WidSets, the mobile widget gallery site. To date, the widgets on WidSets appear to be custom-developed by the WidSets team, the content owners, or both. WidSets provides its own SDK for developers, who can create XML-based widgets for existing web services, or create entirely new widgets through its proprietary language it says is optimized for mobile devices. This apparently marks the first time that WidSets is getting into the distribution of widgets from another source (albeit one from Nokia Ventures Organization).

The mobile widget landscape is starting to shape up nicely. Here is a quick primer:

• BluePulse: widgets promoted as a part of the BluePulse social networking service for mobile devices.
• Mobidgets: The “>as-yet-released mobile widget offering of Mobease and WebWag (whose main product competes in the webtop space).
• MoJax: An AJAX-based widget application framework, this one from mFoundry, a diversified mobile development company.
• OpenWave: Another AJAX widget software development kit called OpenWave Mobile Widgets, with support for Windows Mobile, Symbian, BREW and other platforms.
• Opera: Still more AJAX widgets, these for Opera Platform, also based on web standards with the ability to easily transition web content to mobile devices that are supported by Opera.
• WidSets: Custom mobile widgets for a variety of mobile devices, plus distribution of Symbian S60 widgets.
• Zenzui: Custom, proprietary “tiles” using Zenzui’s zooming interface for accessing Internet content.

Many of these providers promote their AJAX-based platforms and ease of developing with web standards, each is a proprietary solution in its own right. Content owners must choose between platforms, or be prepared to support many. I’ll delve more deeply into further segmenting the mobtop widget category in a future post.

Technorati Tags: widgets, gadgets, tiles, WidSets, Zenzui, Mobidgets, MoJax, OpenWave, BluePulse

But the Washington Post didn’t only remind me that FreeWebs had an interesting widget-related business, it highlighted the fact that they have received $11 million in venture capital. What other widget companies are getting money, how much, and where is it coming from? Here’s a starter list; help me build it by emailing me or replying in the comments..

• Clearspring: $7.5 million from Novak Biddle, ZG Ventures, Mark jung, Steve Case, Ted Leonsis.
• FreeWebs: $11 million from Novak Biddle and Columbia Capital.
• NetVibes: $1 million from Index Ventures, Marc Andreessen, Pierre Chappaz (founder of Kelkoo and Wikio) and Martin Varsavsky (founder of Jazztel, Ya.com and Fon).
• Slide: Rumor of $20 million from Mayfield, Khosla, BlueRun, and Founders Fund, the latter two of which participated in a first round.
• Widgetbox: $1.5 million from Hummer Winblad listed, but that was last June. They’ve likely raised more.
• WidSets: Financial support from Nokia Venture Organization unknown.
• Zenzui: $12 million from Oak Investment Partners and Hunt Ventures, plus heavy R&D support from Microsoft.

Actually, I’ll need a good bit more time to compile this list, as other priorities demand my attention. But with the investments in widgets made by these companies, Apple, Yahoo, Microsoft, Bebo and others, its safe to say that the widget economy is a $100 million plus market and growing.

It calls them widgets, anyway. While using Joost, you have the ability to view My Joost. A key element of My Joost is the ability to show or hide one or more of a small collection of widgets. These include Notice Board, News Ticker, Invite Friends, and Channel Chat, which allow you to engage in real-time text chats with other Joost users about the channel you are currently watching, sort of a real-time social network for watching television.

The Joost widgets only work when you are in full-screen mode, and they overlay the broadcast in an elegant, understated fashion. The number of widgets is rather limited today, but remember that Joost is only in beta. It seems likely that Joost has included widgets as a part of their product architecture so they can easily extend it in the future with new features delivered by the widget capability.

Technorati Tags: widgets, gadgets, joost, broadband, video