Snipperoo

Real World Widgets

A journalist asked me today what the best widgets I'd seen was. I didn't really have an answer at the time. Then I came across Kiva. Kiva is a micro-lending scheme. You lend money to specific loan requests across the world - from as little as $25. You choose who you lend to. This is micro lending at its best I guess. It's hard to choose, but hugely rewarding to help lives like this. And what's more - you get the money back at the end of the loan term.
So I signed Snipperoo up and made our first loan. I've made a company policy that we will set aside $1000 of our reserves to loan through Kiva. We will keep this as a rolling loan - as it gets repaid we will lend it out again. Assuming things here go according to plan, we will up this amount annually.
Best of all, Kiva have widgets that allow you to boast about what you've done and spread the word. 
Now, I suggest you go and create a company policy to loan through Kiva. Or just invest your spare cash here - what a brilliant scheme. Let's see if we can get Yawovi fully funded! Click the widget!
(Thanks to Richard Read/Write for the link)

Do you speak widget?

A Language of Widgets

Do we need more language around widgets? It seems to me that trying to discuss the finer points of widget functionality quickly leads to some inventiveness with language. It's clear that you need to name things in order to bring them into being. Here are my suggestions for the parts of and functions of widgets. This is my view of what widgets are about and of the sort of things that the widget industry will be discussing over the next few years.

If you want to discuss the relationship between your Manifest and your Value, how Embedders desire Reward, or how a Virate can increase your Host numbers, then you need to learn the language of Widgets.

Home: where a widget originates from

Embedder: the person who embeds the widget in their site

• e.g. 'We need to get the word out to all potential embedders'

Host: a site within which the widget is embedded

• e.g. 'Our campaign envisages 10,000 radical alternative Hosts for this widget by month end'.

Manifest: a visible manifestation of the widget

• How the widget displays in the page when embedded, e.g. 'The original Manifest was a bit big, but luckily it was possible to adjust it' or 'Let's keep the Manifest really small so it fits in the sidebar'.

Value: a function of the widget that benefits the embedder

• Why anyone would want to put a widget in their site. This can be anything that the target Embedders find attractive: money, status, power, credibility, e.g. 'Our widget gives you Zlygo points for each clickthrough' or 'Only the top ranked football sites can have this widget'.

Reward: a function of the widget that rewards the viewer

• Why anyone would want to engage with a widget, e.g. 'Win a ticket to the finals', 'Instant news headlines', 'Get your own copy of this widget' or 'Search here'.

Virate: an internal function of the widget that offers a replica of itself

• The code that you need to embed the widget in your own site. There are various ways for the widget to carry this code. It can be directly available, the widget can contain automated methods of embedding or it can link to the Home site where the widget can be constructed.

I will expand on these issues over the next few weeks as I believe it is vital that the widget community understands and discusses these parts of a widget.

Coming Soon…Brand Name Widgets!

Hooman of Clearspring blogs at Widgify

To date, widget creation and distribution has been fairly grassroots. From bling on MySpace to badges for blogs (thanks for the pointer Tim), however, this phenomenon has started to really take off with consumers. Just to give you a clue as to how big some of these things can get, we have already seen some widgets that get 12M views/month!

Some of the biggest brands on the planet are taking note. Advertisers, marketers, and content providers alike recognize the significance of the change. It goes without saying that they do not plan to miss the introduction of this new communications channel - especially when the importance of increasing their audience reach and engagement is greater than ever.

Widget Predictions For 2007

Splashcast makes  My Widget Predictions For 2007

Seems the Wall Street Journal has a story in today’s paper about the growing popularity of widgets, which triggered Splashcast's excellent predictions:

 

You know widgets are the next big thing when the Wall Street Journal starts writing about widgets. Expect more of the traditional media to cover widgets over the next several months.

With all this talk about widgets, here are my predictions for 2007:

    * A national consumer magazine will feature widgets as their cover story
    * Widgets will fuel RSS as people start consuming feeds without even knowing it
    * Most people will have no idea that the cool stuff that appears on their web page or desktop is actually called a widget. A study will quantify this information and bloggers, pundits and the rest will go on and on about what this means for the Internet and humanity.
    * Widgets will take on text ads as a way for micro publishers to make money off their web sites
    * CPM rates for banner ads will drop to all time lows as widgets grow in popularity for advertisers
    * Widgets will raise issues about syndication and copyright protection
    * A widget aggregator, such as Widgetbox or snipperoo will be bought by a big media company like Yahoo! or Google
    * Widgets, coupled with the video sharing phenomena, will change how brands are positioned. More brands will start replacing traditional advertisements with humorous or informative media that people will post to their blogs and web sites through widget players
    * Widgets will change how we we publish to the web. Widgets will become a platform for personal expression as much as blogs or podcasts
    * Thankfully, we will not see a conference called “Widgetpalooza.”

Widget: meet Mashup

Stowe Boyd blogs the new  30boxes timeline widget (and I recommend go read the whole thing) 30 Boxes Timeline Widget and ends with this observation (remember this, you'll hear a lot more along these lines soon):

The complexities? I had to break the code for the widget into two pieces: one piece -- the css settings -- for the of my blog template, and the second piece went into the sidebar. Then I had to tweak a javascript call -- with the help of Narendra Rocherolle of 30 Boxes -- so that the calendar pops near the widget, and not behind the ad at the top of the blog page. If anyone wants deatiled instructions I am sure the folks at 30 Boxes will be publishing.

I really like the sorts of complexity emerging from widgets like. It's a mash-up world!

Widget Coincidences and Copacabana

So I'm sitting in a conference room in one of those gorgeous, slightly shabby white stucco mansions on Carlton House Terrace (The Foreign Press Association, this one - established in 1888) and I get into one of those wi-fi conversations ("have you got a password?" "Yes. I've got a password?" "Can I have the password?" "I suppose so. Don't tell the guy at the desk. I promised I wouldn't give it to anyone else...") with a young man and it turns out that this is a man with a widget and a widget I've actually used (and a widget, of course, that's in the Snipperoo directory). It's Anthony Voldkin, Hunter College undergrad, whose Hype Machine scrapes music blogs for playlists and whose widget... er... puts that sort of thing in your blog and who just happens to be spending a few months in London at Queen Mary University of London. Anyway, we had the Snipperoo conversation (the one about the Snipperoo button). Watch this space...
(Meanwhile, outside in the Mall, the Irish Guards are performing Copacabana).

TechCrunch UK � Blog Archive � BuddyPing: The new wave of MoSoSo

News of a great UK startup with Widgets - heaven. Thanks to TechCrunch UK: The new wave of MoSoSo.

A BuddyPing user profile can also create a Flash-based widget, which a user can place on their blog or social network homepage.

A user can publish their location to the Web widget. It doesn’t display the user’s exact location, since this would cross the line into privacy and have safety concerns, however it does indicate a relative location such as “Covent Garden”. Only a user’s authorised friends can see where they are via the site.

The widget they publish on another site will also show their uploaded photos, and allow anyone to send the user an SMS. BuddyPing charges the sender for this to stop Spam to the mobile.

Widget Directory Top Ten

Our Widget Directory is getting more and more traffic. We're very proud of it - it now has over 2000 widgets listed. Here's the Top Ten most popular categories as of today (number of entries in brackets):

1. Blog Tools (63)
2. Communication (85)
3. Audio & Video (57)
4. Tools  (492)
5. Games (244)
6. Stats & Tracking (39)
7. Photos (94)
8. Maps (38)
9. Entertainment (35)
10. Music (59)

Watch out for a complete redesign and additional features early in the new year.

Widgets 1.0?

A W3C draft proposal for a Widgets standard has been published (thanks Steve Rubel).

Widgets are web applications which use the browser as an environment to    run in, but which do not have the usual browser chrome. They are installed    on a local client, and have several features that are not available to    regular web applications, such as a more explicit security model to allow    them to perform a wider range of tasks easily, and a persistent    information store apart from cookies.

It's quite hard to work out what the purpose or effect of this proposal would be - and it seems to be  very early days on it. They call for proposals, so go read it and feedback. One of the two authors of the document, Anne van Kesteren from the Opera browser company, writes on her blog:

For some time I thought widgets were the latest marketing trick and pretty useless. Now I think they can actually be really useful (and fun) for creating simple applications using HTML, ECMAScript and CSS. Well, and SVG, if you insist. (Also known as open formats, for those who care about that sort of thing.)

Widgets 1.0 is an attempt to find common grounds between various widgets implementations and standardize those. It’s the first public Working Draft and by no means finished (in fact, it has lots of open issues) and all input will be taken into consideration. The relevant mailing list is public-webapi@w3.org.

The other author is Marcos Caceres from Queensland University of Technology.
The draft itself doesn't set out how this came to be written or what the point of it all is. Maybe it's obvious to W3C insiders, but to me it just comes out of the blue.
That said, there are some obviously interesting ideas within the document. Let's spread the word and get on the case.

[UPDATE: As Marcos points out in a comment, there is more detail at http://www.w3.org/TR/WAPF-REQ/. To people not familiar with the w3c proposal process, it's not clear how we're supposed to find this out. Then again, maybe I'm just missing the obvious. What we really need is a discussion outside the proposals as to how they will work. There is a mailing list at public-webapi@w3.org but not any information about how to join it. Marcos?]

BBC Backstage widget competition winners

So congratulations to Pete Cole for his BBC Radio widget- with its rather nice alarm/programme bookmarking functionality for upcoming shows you don't want to miss; he wins first prize in the BBC Backstage widget competition.

Primarily about desktop widgets, the competition had some great ideas; we judges particularly liked Paul Jefferson's My Favourite Bands that mashes up your last.fm feed with the BBC feeds so you can find out when your band is on the radio and what news there's been about them.

One of the nice things about the Google widgets is that they can be converted to web widgets, so I've added Mario Menti's BBC TV & Radio now and next widget to our directory.

Nigel Crawley wins a now-infamous Snipperoo skatedeck (kitted out with plenty of stickers, but no wheels ;)