Google Gadgets - A Review

The widget aggregator space is really heating up.  Today Google introduced Google Gadgets for Webpages, and joins Snipperoo, Widgetbox, and Fox Media’s TheSpringBox as companies seeking to provide the infrastructure for the growing widget ecosystem.

Google Gadgets have been around for a while as embeddable widgets for a user’s personalized Google home page and Google Desktop.  During this time, Google has been quietly accumulating widgets – more than 1200 to be exact – and most of them developed outside of Google.  As of today, Google is providing embeddable JavaScript code snippets for each of the widgets in its directory that allow folks to plug these widgets into their own sites.

Google is not yet providing any sort of end user widget management system – their offering consists solely of a directory of developer submitted widgets, and a widget platform that houses the widgets.

To be more precise, developers submit their widgets to the Google widget directory, and Google provides distribution and attaches their branding to each widget.

Applications & Opportunity

For a discussion of the applications and opportunity for widget aggregators, please see here, here, and here.

Configuration and Testing

The Google widget directory currently consists of more than 1200 widgets, listed 24 to a page with a thumbnail and an “Add to your webpage” button.

Clicking “Add to your webpage” takes you to the Google widget configuration tool.  Depending on the widget, there can be various configuration options, but the core settings that appear to be available for every widget are Title, Width, Height, and Border.

Every widget that I looked at was optimized for a width of over 300 pixels, and of the ten or so widgets that I tried to install in my TypePad sidebar, most of them simply wouldn’t reduce in a format that was legible.  The two that are currently installed were the best of the bunch in terms of fitting in a sidebar, and as you can see, they’re not perfect.

The Google Gadget code is a script, so it will not work with most SNS profile pages, or on Blogger posts…. you would think (more on this to follow).

While I was able to install Google Gadgets in both my TypePad and Blogger sidebars, unless something changes with the formatting, they won’t be there for long, as they simply don’t fit in a typical blog’s sidebar.  Sort of a bummer, I think, as widgets belong in the sidebar more than they do in a body of a post.  Also, putting a script-based widget in the body of your post can break your RSS feed.

The Google Gadget itself is nice enough looking, with the top of the widget’s frame branded and linked to the developer’s site, and the bottom of the widget’s frame linked to the new Google Gadgets landing page.  There is also a button on every widget that allows you to add the widget to your Google home page (as an aside, can an independent company like Netvibes ever match this sort of vertical integration?)

So if you’re like me, you’re wondering at this point… “Where the hell am I going to put these widgets?”  They don’t fit in sidebars, they don’t work with MySpace, and because they’re script based, they don’t work in Blogger posts.

However, this particular script DOES work on Blogger posts.  On a hunch given that Blogger and Google Gadgets are part of the same big, happy family, I tried submitting a Google Gadget in the body of a Blogger post.   I got an html error saying that the tag “script” was not allowed.  When I overrode this error by checking the box, the widget posted normally.  Interesting.

So to summarize my testing experiences, while Google has amassed a broad array of fun little widgets, as it stands today, they are just not widely usable – at least the way that I use widgets.  Waiving the script ban for Blogger posts for these widgets helps a little, but I’d much rather see these things optimized for a sidebar.

Editorial

If Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information, and widgets are truly the new Web pages, then it should not be a surprise that Google is getting into this space. 

However, there are a couple of surprises with this release. 

I’m surprised that Google is getting into the directory business – a directory would seem to be very un-googlelike.  Directories are content, and Google has always seemed to prefer other folks to amass the content (see DMOZ).

I am also surprised that they’ve optimized their entire widget directory for 300+ pixels wide.  This makes zero sense to me.  The grand master of widget usage Fred Wilson makes a pretty good case that widgets were made to go in the sidebar, not in the body of the post.  Are these wide widgets just a carry-over from modules being optimized for Google customizable home page?  Were they rushing to get this thing out to meet some milestone?  Or did they not do their homework? 

The Blogger script allow is also interesting on a number of fronts.  Clearly, Google needs an outlet for their 1200 ultra-wide, script-based widgets.  If you build them that way, there are not a lot of places that can house them.  In this context, including Blogger posts as possible homes for these widgets is a big deal. 

The other way to look at this move is as an attempt to strengthen Blogger itself.  By making Blogger the only major free blogging platform that can house Google Gadgets in posts themselves, couldn’t that be considered a major reason to use Blogger and not MySpace or Xanga to host your blog? 

Having spent a number of hours going through TheSpringBox, Snipperoo, and Widgetbox over the last week or so, I can say with some confidence that Google has a long way to go.  Snipperoo is farther along than Google is, and they’re still in closed beta.  Widgetbox’s directory is infinitely slicker and usable than Google’s.  TheSpringBox isn’t really showing their cards yet, but they have the ace in the hole of millions of widget crazy users waiting to plug stuff into their MySpace profiles.

The breadth of widgets that Google has accumulated is impressive, and the Blogger relationship is a nice advantage.  But the rest of the offering is not yet up to the high standards set by the start-ups in this space.

 

 

 

 

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