Widget Mail – A Review of Gigya

Gigya is a web based email service that allows you to embed widgets into the body of your email messages.  Widgets can be chosen from pre-existing categories (layouts, smilies, videos, etc.), or by posting code into an embed field. 

Gigya feels like social media applied to email, and it’s not just the widgets that cause that effect.  Your contacts are displayed as headshots / icons, not just email addresses, and you can upload your own photo as part of your profile.

I had no problems either selecting widgets from the Gigya menu, or embedding my own.  But here’s the catch: if you embed a Flash widget into an email, it arrives to (non-Gigya) recipients as an image.  In other words, recipients that are not checking their mail at Gigya.com are forced to click on a thumbnail of the widget in order to see the Flash version.

This causes no issues for widgets that are layouts or images.  But for more interactive widgets like video and RSS feeds, it’s not ideal.  Clicking through on the image of the widget takes you to a hosted Gigya page where the actual widget is displayed.  It’s a bit clunky.

Conceptually, Gigya is a killer idea.  When was the last time we saw a radical rethinking of email?  Email doesn’t have to be boring and stodgy.  Widgets could go a long way towards reviving this sputtering medium.  Furthermore, email has a built in viral factor which should give Gigya a good chance of getting some adoption. 

One minor point to continue my recent theme of widget distribution: if widget enhanced email takes off, services like Gigya could be a nice channel for widget aggregators to partner with.  For example, I’d love to be able to pull my Widgetbox or Musestorm widgets right from my Gigya control panel, for insertion into my email.

As reported on Mashable, Gigya has recently raised some money.  They're off to a solid start, and I can’t wait to see if the concept of widget mail has legs.  (somebody already snapped up widgetmail.com btw)

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