Snipperoo

Shape of Things to Come

Clearspring roll out a brand widget for the Indianapolis Colts. Hooman says:

The colts widget is a first test for the franchise. It is basically a modified slide show.  They are starting to dive into widget syndication and wanted to use our system to build, track, and deploy more rapidly.  This helped them get things done in a matter of a week, as opposed to weeks.

We will see a lot of these in the coming year. Clearspring are working hard on their widget production system, as are Musestorm and others. We will no doubt see clarification of and competition in the various parts of the widget value chain over the coming year. For the time being, its really time for innovation and rollout of ideas in the space. What I like about this widget (apart from the fact that it is almost a microsite in its own right) is that it carries its own distribution system within itself. The widget carries a 'Grab it!' link, which rotates the widget to show how to get your own copy. Lovely. You can see this widget live at the Clearspring blog.

Instant Pictures

You can make an instant 'badge' of any page on the internet by using Webshots new screenshot product. Just enter the address of any page and it gives you a bit of code which is a thumbnail and a link to the full sized screenshot.

Click to Call widget

Skype
Om Malik reports:

Skype’s Click-to-call allows you to click a hyperlink, and initiate a call to either a Skype user or use the Skype network to connect to a PSTN phone number. It has become quite popular with bloggers in particular, who embed the Skype Me button on their website.

Perish the thought! I never change my status, so this will say I'm online all through the day and night. If someone would invent an application that allowed me to automate this - or at least do it through a simple toolbar - maybe. Well, try me. I'm always happy to chat (about widgets and stuff).

Seriously, you can embed the Skype button like this, though I can't see I notice it much on blogs - and I've certainly never used it. I think we'll see a lot more of this, as does Om, with Google getting in on the act:

Skype, wants to leverage its 113 million registered users to become the defacto standard for “click to calls,” Don Albert, North America General Manager for Skype told us in an early morning chat. Skype/eBay had crafted a similar deal with Yahoo previously but that was focused on the US market alone. Skype’s push in this direction can have ramifications for many start-ups who are betting that SIP will be the defacto standard for click to call.

The use of click-to-call is particularly of interest to Google, which has been mucking around with this technology for a while. This deal reflects the slow progress that project. Google and others know that click to call will open up a new source of advertisers, those who don’t have a website but work mostly on the phone.

Still it is too early to say how the click to call business is going to play out. Albert admitted that it is a new behavior and people’s habits will have to change. “Folks are used to clicking on Google and eBay, while Skypers are used to making calls, so I think we have a good shot at making it happen.”

A widget business model

I just wrote a comment to an excellent post by David Beisel, Genuine VC, where he asks the question 'What are the business models for the services that enable and create these badges? Or are they just another marketing tactic for services as opposed to something to develop a business around? Are they a means to an end or an end in and of themselves?' David's post is part of a developing conversation around widgets and the widgetsphere, with commentary such as ' badges are a unique combination of marketing and technology, like interactive stickers for the web. They are becoming another method for self-expression in and of themselves.  Bumper stickers for the internet generation to communicate to others in “traffic.”'  I liked my contribution, so I thought I'd post it here for the record.

A widget can be anything. There won't be any centralised production method or certification system, that would miss the point. Any bit of code that can be inserted into a site and which does something is a widget.
In the widgetsphere, there are three issues and they apply to all widgets. Value and Distribution.
Value is the value of the widget to the person who has to make a decision to insert that widget into their (limited) site real estate. The value can be direct (AdSense), indirect (gets traffic, subscribers) or emotional (esteem, kudos)or a mixture of these. Without value a widget will not get installed anywhere.
Distribution is how it actually gets installed, i.e. cut and paste, auto-insertion, walled-garden drag and drop.
So you can be in the Value business or you can be in the Distribution business (or both).
The value business is really the realm of marketing and/or advertising folk and I expect to see marketing companies jump on this big time. How do you create a widget that carries value, that will get big time adoption and that gives a ROI. This already is a specialist field without any specialists in it, but it looks very interesting.
Distribution is something different, how do you reach everyone who may want to insert your widget? How do you make it easy for them - not only to insert it, but to remove it again. Can you automate this process. How about widgets that auto delete. How about widgets that only show in response to certain conditions, or to certain visitors. This is a distribution issue. This is wehere Snipperoo is operating.
There is another issue, where several companies are operating, but its a red herring. That's the area around 'how do you make a widget'. As I said, a widget can be anything that will run in a web site. There are millions of people in the world who can build them using whatever technologies the like. Anthing that cramps this resource will not fly. That's why Snipperoo are technology agnostic. We are the universal widget.

Marketing Widget - Woo!

This is interesting. Cameron Olthius is blogging at Postbubble about a marketing widget called CreamAid (terrible name).

CREAMaid is a conversation management tool that helps companies extend and manage their customer relationships.  The easy-to-create widget is meant to help carry on conversations with bloggers. Once a conversation starts any blogger can join in to give his/her opinions. All the blogs that participate in the conversation will become connected through the widget and all contributions are viewable anywhere the widget is used. There’s a catch, posts must be selected by the conversation starter in order to be brought into the conversation. This is to prevent spam and of course anything bad that is said about the company.

A strange beast it is too. It's confusing to use because Cream Aid have put up a pretend 'Cream Aid drink' site and inserted the widget into it, so you get a sort of loop of self-reference, making it hard to understand what is going on. The widget does seem to be prepared to pay cash for contributing to the conversation and for carrying the widget - although in this version the cash available is set at $0.

But the widget itself is fascinating on another level - it's the first pure marketing widget I've seen that attempts to step outside the simple advert or content widgets that we've seen up to now. Cameron concludes:

There is a clear need for tools that will help companies manage conversations about their brand but I don’t see this one being very effective. I do not see anything here other then a widget that companies can use to control the message.

This iteration may or may not be perceived as an attempt to slip a widget into the mainstream that allows the company to control the message. But this will be the first of many approaches to widgetised message distribution - or widgetised marketing. Cameron says, 'This sounds a lot like regular blogging doesn’t it?'. Well, it does look like the first stirrings of a blog platform in a widget. Rudimentary, but it's there. We will see a lot more of this over the next few years.