Major Marketers Cozy Up to Widgets

If you want to get a taste for what can be done with widgets, you gotta check out LabPixies. They have an array of absolutely gorgeous ones (they call them gadgets) that run on Windows Live, Google, Pageflakes and Netvibes. These also can be integrated into any web site.

More importantly, LabPixies is making money. Major marketers, including Amazon, Apple, Travelocity and Yahoo have teamed with the company to build sponsored widgets. Most of these are designed to drive e-commerce transactions.

The widget space is heating up. We're just beginning to scratch the surface of what widgets and personalized start pages can do. Most of all, they will drive the adoption of RSS without the user needing to know what the heck a feed is. Where's My Yahoo in all of this? Everyone's got a web-based platform play except them.

Comments

[Nick Wilson]

Definately great work. Many are not what I would define as Widgets though, they do stuff, but they're not pushing or pulling data in any way, and are really just pretty looking blog bling.

Definately cool though.

[Rex Hammock]

Here's another one for you, Steve, although it's not necessarily a widget, but definitely some "flare" -- iTunes now has an option when you create an iMix to "display it on the web" -- a bit of code to do what Amazon is doing. Missing ingredient: you can't push people to an affiliate store version yet -- or maybe you can and I haven't figured it out.

[Adam Zand]

Hi Rex,
iMix is interesting but you're still locked into proprietary Apple orchard.

My client, Podcast Ready, has a widget called feedCaster for podcast listening and promotion that fits on any Web site, MySpace etc. as simple code. Free download at http://www.podcastready.com/tools.php

Cool factor is that feedCaster allows for audience feedback (audio and video) making podcasting truly interactive - something that Steve Rubel questioned long ago as a barrier to adoption.

[Fred Dixon]

I think Web widgets are going to really take off with the myspace-generation. The ability for a user to add the latest cool mini-applications to their web-page fits into the "this web page is my room" mindset.

We are all going to go thorough a maturity curve, just like in the early days with web pages. First you have fun with it (wow, this is cool), then you make it overly graphical (remember the large animated GIFs, blinking text, and dancing bunnies), then you make it useful.

The useful part comes when widgets save you time, effort, and money for people. It's the flashy widgets that will get all the press, but it's the small, unobtrusive, useful widgets that will get long-term place on the desktop or web-page.