Widgets

Interesting post today by Bernard Warner on how widgets will affect mainstream web media companies. Full post here

Two bits that I thought were particulary pertinent:

"... believes that in five years the typical net user will collect all his relevant data and application feeds from one page. Conventional bookmarks will give way to a single aggregator where headlines from rival newspapers and blog commentators will inform our world."

Five years? 2 max. And brands need to be thinking about this now. How do you communicate your brand when people will be looking at updates to your site via a RSS reader that strips out everything except the words and photos/videos (that's if you can create enough of a relationship with them to get them to add you to their reader in the first place)? Flash sites and pretty skins, and many of the tricks brands currently use, are mostly useless in this world. Every brand will need a blog to tell their stories and have converstaions. So many brands can't create a regular website that people will want to come back to; this is going to be an even greater challenge. But if they can crack it, then it's a great opportunity for the brand to reach the consumer fresh everyday.

"One of the tenets of the widget economy is that it will bring about an unprecedented era of personalisation. This much is true. But it also requires a level of openness not yet seen in the net economy. Websites will have to open themselves up to third-party developers, a radical proposition for established online properties. For news outlets, it will mean delivering news via feeds to the eyeballs rather than the established model of attracting the eyeballs to their news."

Motorola and Burger King have done some interesting widgets for Myspace. Very easy to see effectiveness, in terms of take up. But I'm still having too many conversations with clients along the lines of "but we want people to come to our website, not make something for someone else's". The lack of willingness to open up is worrying, or as expected, depending on your point of view.

LastFM, Twitter, eBay, flickr, TechCrunch are all pretty big 'web2.0' companies who have done widgets for Facebook, and there are loads of widget games etc from developers, but nothing from 'big brands'. I suppose they'll get there eventually: branded games and quizes seem obvious easy wins for most FMCG brands, a mobile company could offer an widget that let you see where selected friends were via GPS and google maps, or that let you send X number of free group texts.

There's more on facebooks openess policy and how it's affected the netowrk's growth and the impact widgets can have on brands in this post.

Want to know a bit more about the trend for widgets? Try this...Year of the widget. Mac users love their widgets...flickr pics of dashboard widgets.
And go to iGoogle for a simple way to get used to widgets (if you're not already exoeriencing the widget frenzy on facebook that is). iGoogle is one of Google's fastest growing products.