Timothy Post of Flying Seeds left a fantastic comment on A VC the other day that I think raises some interesting points. He sees widgets to date as being fueled by a desire for self expression. Moving forward, he expects widgets to take more private, more utilitarian forms. Specifically, he envisions each widget having its own url and being called to mobile devices as needed. Here's what he has to say:
Public vs Private widgets.
Self-expression vs. Self-organization.
I'd like to make a distinction between the current state of the widgetsphere and how I believe it might evolve.
Currently, widgets (snippets of embed code which live on host websites, blogs, MySpace pages, etc) pull data from other third party web services and are generally forms of self-expression.
People, like Fred, paste widgets onto their websites as a way of sharing their interests, tastes, identities, etc. This is fine but I think what we are witnessing, and Fred's blog post here is an inflection point, is a point of diminishing returns.
The value of these public widgets (self-expression) is losing some of its sex appeal and novelty. It's getting boring.
What's the next step for widgets? I would argue that private widgets which serve as mini-data containers or short-form websites to help us manage and organize the overwhelming amount of data who have all accumulated in our personal lives by living in this modern world of ours.
He goes on to provide one vision for how this evolution could happen:
Widgets needs to be freed from websites and go mobile. Widgets are the perfect form factor to go mobile with Fred and family. As I have written about recently on my blog Flyingseeds.com, mobile widgets on the new iPhone and other internet connected cell phones will be the platform of choice 12 months out.
I actually think that the current trend of pasting widget embed code on internet websites will prove a distraction rather than the end game.
Widgets are really "short-form" websites. Why bother to go to your American Airlines Admirals Club account page on the internet when you could simply open a widget created by the Admirals Club.
The missing piece in the evolution is a web service which offers an "address book" for all of these personalized mobile widgetcards. Fred's post proves that a blog is not the ideal storage container for widgets.
So while we are still thinking through the future of widgets, let's keep thinking outside of the "widgetbox" and not get stuck thinking of widgets as only little boxes of self-expression which live on html pages.
Timothy writes more on this subject in his post entitled Free Range Widgets.
While I'm not sure if the self-expression aspect of widgets is ever going to go away, I do find his vision of private, mobile widgets pretty intriguing. For example, would it be useful for me to be able to pull a box.net file storage widget to my PDA to grab a song, a photo, or a file? Absolutely.
Because the widget space is so new, not many folks have taken a shot at predicting how it will evolve - most of us are still grappling with figuring out exactly what's going on now. I'm looking forward to reading more from Flying Seeds as Timothy continues to flesh this out.
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