The web has seen an explosion in the use of widgets over the past year or so. So let's explore what a widget is and its uses. Note that in this post, we're discussing Web-based widgets only, rather than desktop widgets such as those provided by Yahoo Widgets or Microsoft's Vista widgets.
A Web widget can be best described as a mini application that can add functionality to your web page, blog, social profile etc. If you find a widget that you like, you simply copy and paste some code and add it to the HTML of your web page. Photo galleries, news, videos, advertising, mp3 players and pregnancy countdown tickers! You name it, there is probably a widget that does it.
There have been a lot of very successful widgets to date. Here is a sample:
MyBlogLog is a widget that allows you to see other bloggers on the MyBlogLog network, as they visit your site. You can see it in action on the right hand side of this post. It has been a huge success for its creators and was acquired by Yahoo for a rumored $12 million in January.
YouTube's widget allows users to place videos on their social networking profiles and blogs. It was a major factor in their rise to fame and eventual sale to Google for $1.65 billion.
Google Adsense has made a lot of money for website owners since its inception. It is probably the most widely distributed widget around. You can sign up for an Adsense account and relevant adverts are shown where you place the widget on your site. You then get a share of the revenue generated with Google. Whole sites and services exist today on the web that are solely funded by their share of revenue from displaying the Adsense widget. Estimated value? Billions!
The FeedBurner widget shows you how many people are subscribed to your RSS feed. It doesn't have much use and is not very accurate in a lot of cases. But that little number it displays is still one of the biggest bragging rights available to a successful blogger, in spite of those bloggers who game the system.
Image slideshow widgets from slide.com
If you are planning on building a widget or getting one for your site, there are a number of great websites to get you started. All of the following have vast directories of widgets to choose from and will help you distribute, track and monitor your widget should you choose to build one.
Snipperoo is just getting going at the moment, but already they have a directory of over 3,000 widgets to choose from and a very flexible method of delivering your widget. Ivan Pope (Snipperoo founder) also runs an excellent blog which discusses all things widgets.
Spring Widgets is a platform put together by Fox interactive. They don't have a big selection of widgets at the moment, but their list is growing day by day. They only support flash widgets, but they have a cool desktop runtime that you can download. It allows you to grab any Spring Widget from the web and use it on your desktop. What's really interesting about Spring Widgets is that they are owned by Fox, which also owns MySpace. With MySpace kicking off so much third party content from their site lately, I foresee them making Spring Widgets the only way to put a widget onto MySpace - which will help them control the flow of content through the site.
ClearSpring has just served their 3 billionth widget as of this month. Impressive stuff. They have a nice clean interface for deploying your widget and offer some really cool tracking metrics.
WidgetBox also has a big collection of widgets to choose from for your site. They also provide some nice reports on your widget usage. Users can grab widgets they like from any site that has a widgetbox widget and pop it into their own sidebar or Netvibes/Pageflakes page, for example.
Nokia's new platform Widsets is a great example of what can be done with mobile widgets. You simply download their free software to your mobile and choose from a host of widgets. Once you hook your phone up with them, you can log into their site at any time and choose which widgets you want - and it pushes them out to your phone. This is a really great service. I was easily able to create a custom Read/WriteWeb widget for my phone in minutes, using their studio.
Heres a YouTube video Widget of Kaj from Widsets explaining how it all works
Of course widgets have been in use in the world of advertising for a long time. Companies like DoubleClick have used javascript widgets to deliver their adverts to sites for years. The modern day king of the commerce widget is of course the Google Adsense widget. Here are a few other players in the market:
Auction Ads allows you to display live eBay auctions on your site, with a share of eBay affiliate fees coming your way.
Tumri lets their users create customized widgets to promote products on their site from a range of partners; such as Overstock, Shop.com, and Walmart. Revenue is then shared out between the website owner and Tumri.
Nooked is a newcomer to the market. They are just beginning to roll out their feed commerce widgets across a network of partner blogs. They are one to watch for the future. [disclosure: Read/WriteWeb's editor Richard MacManus is an advisor to Nooked]
Sites like Pageflakes, Netvibes, Your Minis, iGoogle and My Yahoo allow you to choose from many different widgets (including email, news, weather) and build your own homepage for your browser.
I have only touched on what's happening in the world of widgets in this post. Widgets are literally everywhere these days, in all shapes and sizes. For the moment widgets are the new black, but they also come with their own inherent problems - such as scale. For example if someone with 100,000 visitors a day places your widget on their site, essentially you as the widget maker inherit that traffic. That's a good thing, but you need to be prepared to take the load. Slow loading widgets often cause problems on their host websites.
Another issue is one of style; some sites are becoming increasingly clogged with widgets that have no relation to each other - in terms of form or design. So the page as a whole can end up looking like a car crash.
But to finish on a positive note, widgets add a lot of functionality to your site. Functionality that you can pick and choose as you wish. They also add potential revenue streams for you, which is always a good thing.
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: World Wide Web of Widgets.
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Certamente voc√™ j√° ouviu falar de widgets. Tem aqueles pra Mac, os do Vista… Mas a abrang√™ncia √© bem mais ampla: a web. Estamos vivendo a era dos widgets na web, pequenos peda√ßos de conte√∫do din√¢mico, que se espalham por v√°rios sites, blo... Read More
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Nice summary Lenny - good stuff. One other widget platform that is worth checking out is the Israeli company Musestorm. They have a very slick RSS to Flash Widget conversion tool that makes it really easy for first time widget publishers to get started.
Posted by: lawrence | May 10, 2007 12:10 AMGreat article on widgets!
Posted by: Michael Vu | May 10, 2007 12:11 AMThanks for a great article. Just like to point out it's Snipperoo (not Sniperoo or other variants!).
Posted by: Ivan Pope | May 10, 2007 12:30 AMGreat article! I have been using the AuctionAds widget and its now taken over AdSense on my site. With the success of AuctionAds I wonder how long eBay will let them grow before shutting them down as they launch there own widgets.
Posted by: Roger Webb | May 10, 2007 12:36 AMoops, sorry Ivan -- spelling fixed now.
Posted by: Richard MacManus | May 10, 2007 12:40 AMI like what js-kit.com are doing. The comments widget is pretty cool.
Posted by: Mal | May 10, 2007 2:19 AMIf widgets are the new black, then bookmarking icons are the new pink.
Posted by: Ali | May 10, 2007 3:11 AMEvery time someone creates something useful on the net like Widgets we all go crazy and do it so much that the whole idea becomes less useful. Widgets are like Social Networks their growing too fast in popularity and therefore quickly rendering themselves obsolete.
Posted by: eBizMBA | May 10, 2007 3:36 AMThis is a nice summary type of Intro.
I'd like to quote that, Pageflakes is a good site compared to iGoogle
nice article.
Posted by: FM | May 10, 2007 3:48 AMI am use widsets on my nokia phone
Posted by: Andre72 | May 10, 2007 4:15 AMWhat does someone who blogs about widgets, need to do in order to get noticed here?
Posted by: Derek Anderson | May 10, 2007 4:29 AMDont forget the xindesk widget platform, http://www.widgetplus.com
Posted by: Mikael Bergkvist | May 10, 2007 5:22 AMWidgets have their place. They are most suited on a blog and I suppose thats why they were originally designed. Placing one on a website might be a different story. Nice posts once again.
Posted by: Psychic | May 10, 2007 5:34 AMPerhaps more impressive is that the growth in this space is focused squarely around just a subset of the 8% of the web population who engage in Web 2.0 activities such as blogging and start pages. And how many of these use widgets on a regular basis (outside of AdSense)? Even a 10% guess would mean that less than 1% of the web population uses web widgets. There's a LOT of growth possible in this space in both number of users and the actual real estate available for placing web widgets. So the question is, do we convince the other 99% to become web publishers, or do we make web widgets accessible to everyone?
Posted by: Danny | May 10, 2007 6:44 AMTerrific article, David!
One interesting recent development is the appearance of "Gadget Ads" - Google gadgets like the ones on iGoogle, but which are distributed through AdSense. Here's an article describing it, from the Googlified blog.
Tumri has something similar too, according to TechCrunch.
Posted by: NitinK | May 10, 2007 7:03 AMI like this widget found at www.JunkIWant.com
If you have an Amazon wishlist its really cool way to display it on your blog/social networking site.
Posted by: Tom | May 10, 2007 7:16 AMThe usefullness of widgets largely depends on whether they are personalised on not.
Posted by: Mikael Bergkvist | May 10, 2007 7:26 AMThe widgetplus Finder widget, a filemanager, is personalised, so if a user visited a music store that allowed this widget, then the user could purchase music and immidatly drag the file over to the Finder, from where the file can be renamed, moved to another folder, viewed/played to make sure it's not damaged, etc..
This operation is possible regardless where the widget is present, so a user could do this on any number of sites, making some types of online business much simplier.
Ironic that a word that used to be business-speak for "generic product" has come into such fashion.
I would caution about conflating "widgets" with "components." Most of the examples here are just modular programming (albeit occasionally very useful code)--web-based utilities designed to plug into someone else's front end.
What's handy to developers is of little interest to most site visitors, who don't really care whether you wrote the search field or created a favicon yourself or embedded a bit of someone else's code to do it for you.
Posted by: Diana | May 10, 2007 9:04 AMever more modular web. loving it.
Posted by: feedmashr.com | May 10, 2007 9:50 AMI love widgets! They make the world wide web go around. Best of all, the most interesting widget has yet to arrive, but no worries, because soon, everyone will be blipd.
Posted by: Ty Graham | May 10, 2007 10:15 AMGreat article...I would like to mention that Yourminis should be included in the widget platform category. We offer content creators and 3rd party developers a widget platform to help them build, syndicate and measure their widget performance with advanced tracking and analytics.
In addition for consumers we offer a social library for widget discovery. Thanks for your support.
Posted by: alex bard | May 10, 2007 10:33 AMGreat article and nice to hear all the great stuff about widgets. But, don't forget all the independent widget bloggers, developers and mash-up artists who are helping fuel the fire...
Posted by: Ming | May 10, 2007 10:50 AMLast month at Lijit we compiled the first survey of Widget popularity (Guess what's the most popular widget on the web?!). You can see the charts and analysis in this blog post:
Posted by: Stan James | May 10, 2007 11:26 AMhttp://www.lijit.com/node/352
Don't forget about Mpire who just launched their money-making widgets earlier this week
Posted by: Yan | May 10, 2007 11:53 AMFollowing a great post about us (Dapper) the other week --
How about a great platform for anyone to create ANY widget for anything?
Check this one out I made with Dapper for Starnum.com:
http://www.dapper.net/widget/create.php?dappName=StarnumCatalogSearch&noLayout;=1
All you have to do is supply a name, decide what fields you want included, and you have a searchable storefront to Starnum (think: ANY store). You can even lock it in to specific item categories by clicking on "Set Input" and supplying a keyword.
The possibilities for eCommerce (especially mid-size that may not have the resources to create their own full-blown widgets or Google Gadgets) are endless.
Posted by: Paul Knegten | May 10, 2007 12:13 PMFollowing a great post about us (Dapper.net) the other week...
How about a platform for making a widget from any content? I made this one in a few minutes with Dapper by mapping search results on Starnum.com an online shopping site -- check it out:
http://www.dapper.net/widget/create.php?dappName=StarnumCatalogSearch&noLayout;=1
This widget is essentially a searchable storefront for Starnum (think: ANY store). Supply a name, pick the fields you want shown, and get an HTML embed code and put this thing anywhere.
The possibilities for eCommerce widgets or gadgets like this (especially for mid-size companies that may not have the resources to devote to developing their own full-blown widget) are endless. Affiliates themselves have the power to do this for sites they're a part of.
Exciting times...
Posted by: Paul Knegten | May 10, 2007 12:19 PMI wonder about issues of ownership and stability. Using a widget is much quicker and places less strain on my site than coding something myself - e.g. I could display videos using the YouTube widget and have people rate them using a widget from rateitall. But what if I want to do interesting new things with the rating data - will I be able to extract the information from rateitall? What if YouTube folds or changes their policies - will it be feasible to quickly switch to another type of video widget? I guess these are the sorts of things one always has to consider when outsourcing stuff.
Posted by: Martin | May 10, 2007 12:43 PMI'm personally not a huge fan of widgets. I use them in moderation, but do not use sites such as pageflakes.com or netvibes.com as a homepage. However, the web is moving towards more and more of these widgets, so maybe it's time for me to change?
Posted by: Stef | May 10, 2007 1:05 PMHere's a whole business model built on a polling widget...
http://www.buzzdash.com/index.php?page=home
Posted by: David | May 10, 2007 2:36 PMI think I've just become a fan of widgets as well. My sidebar has a widget clutter. Likewise I agree that it adds visual appeal to a blog if used in moderation.
And like the others I agree that this is another well-written article. :)
Posted by: ipanema | May 10, 2007 4:45 PMThe problem with pages like iGoogle or pageflakes is the time they take to load : I use the generic http://www.google.com.au/firefox
Posted by: Norman | May 10, 2007 7:21 PMas my start page then move on to other widget loaded pages when I'm ready.
Great article as always on your site! I think the development of eCommerce widgets what will make them really take off amond the blogers and make them even more widespread. Even now more and more sites starting to use them but not I don't think anyone does it to their full potential :)
Posted by: TheSpot-er | May 11, 2007 3:32 AMGr8 to read here. I always find informative article posts and they're real gr8 help. I just wrote two days ago on widgets on my site. I could get to make a google widget to add to igoogle and blog posts at widget box which is a gr8 tool. So is mybloglog and its gr8 adding and exploring.
Your info is in-depth and thanks for providing such wonderful exploring.
- ilaxi
Posted by: ilaxi | May 11, 2007 9:54 AMDave!
Posted by: Adrienne Zurub | May 11, 2007 7:49 PMLove my widgets. Especially on MyBloglog.com and WidgetBox! Good article.
Adrienne Zurub
http://adriennezurub.typepad.com/link_addiction
Hi,
Posted by: victor | May 13, 2007 8:33 AMI love widgets, and it's why I have made my own and propose it to everybody : FeedFlash, the more simple feed flash reader on the Web !
http:///www.feedflash.net/
Sugarcode The Web!(www.sugarcodes.com) has just introduced a new widget here: http://www.sugarcodes.com/stuff/
Take a look at their Search feature and their new widget!
Posted by: Charles Knight | May 17, 2007 9:40 AM