Sexy Widget

More Widget Metrics

Charlene Li of Forrester Research just released a study called Social Technographics which examines how people interact with online media.  As part of the study,  Forrester surveyed about 4,500 adults and 4,500 youths in late 2006.

Niall Kennedy discusses Charlene's findings in a podcast that is available on his blog.

According to this research, only about 8% of youths have used widgets (by use, I think they mean publish on their blog or profile page), versus the more than 60% who use social networking sites at least weekly.

A Balanced Attack

A VC points to a nice summary of a recent keynote by Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire.  While the keynote was about the distribution of video, just about all of it should be heeded by widget publishers of all media types.  Here are some stand out quotes:

Reach consumers where they are, not where you want them to be

I love this.  This should be the subtitle for the whole widget movement.  This is why we microchunk and free up and syndicate our content.  It's because we want consumers to be able to enjoy our content and functionality in flow, and not on some isolated web site.  Jeremy really hit the ball out of the park here.

And this:

The idea, says Allaire, should be some "blended distribution strategy" that includes a branded content site, strategic syndication to affiliate sites, and viral distribution through widgets or players such as Brightcove's that "empower the consumer to distribute it for you."

This is why I get so irked by Nick Denton's slights about widgets.  Nick is taking on an imaginary adversary who is shouting that widgets are a panacea for everything.  That if you have a widget, you have a business.  That soon there will be no ownership of websites, just widgetized and remixed chunks of content.

From where I'm standing, nobody is really arguing this.  Widgets are part of a larger distribution strategy.  It's exciting, because it's a new distribution channel.  Viral, word of mouth marketing is nothing new of course, but what's new is being able to give consumers the exact message and presentation that you want distributed, and let them run with it if they choose.

Bizdev isn't going away.  Advertising isn't going away.  Media principles like the importance of controlling your distribution aren't going away.  But what we're seeing from a marketing perspective, is the emergence of an important new distribution channel - the consumer - through which companies can package their best stuff - content, functionality, experience - and let consumers do with it what they may.

Obviously, I see everything through widget lenses, but I found myself nodding and getting fired up about everything Jeremy says.

Google Won't Kill Dodgeball

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that contrary to Valleywag's predictions (here, here, and here), Google is not going to kill Dodgeball.  I don't care if the founders are gone, and I don't care if Twitter looks like the runaway winner in the social SMS messaging space.

Google loves platforms that encourage consumers to give them their content.  Whether it be Search, Blogger, Google Base, Google Calendar, or countless other applications, Google provides the tools, we provide the content, and Google learns from that content and figures out how to slap ads on it.  This is what they do - and do better than anybody else.  Dodgeball provides the SMS piece of this strategy.

Is there any question that Google's ad network couldn't benefit from knowing exactly where Dodgeball users are at any given moment?  Or on a broader level, that Google wouldn't know exactly what to do with all of the activity and preference data that Twitter is already generating?  My guess is that there's a couple of sharp young Google PMs working on making Dodgeball more Twitter-like as we speak.   They'll give it a go as a Twitter knock off for a while and try and do to Twitter what Google Calendar did to 30 Boxes.  If that doesn't work, Google will admit defeat and try and snap up Twitter.

Having a steady, constantly updated stream of activity, thought, and preference data from consumers is an ad network's dream (compare this sort of stream with the stagnant, rarely updated profiles on a Facebook or MySpace).  I find the idea of Google somehow choosing to abandon the SMS platform that could enable this data stream to be preposterous.

(oh yeah, Google will you please make a Dodgeball widget so I don't have to build my own?  Twitter's widget seems to be doing OK)

Lijit Widget Stats

I just came across a fascinating study of widget to blog penetration that was conducted by profile aggregator Lijit.

They conducted the study by crawling 8.5K or so blogs, centered on the 119 blogs where Lijit showed up and expanding outwards from there via blogrolls.

They took a fairly broad definition of widgets including things like Google Analytics and AdSense.

What they found is that functional widgets such analytics, ads, and trackbacks are ruling the day.

There were some surprising entries in the top widgets.  According to this study, Twitter is already one of the top content widgets in the blogosphere, trailing only MyBlogLog and Flickr.  Lijit's own inclusion as one of the top non ad / analytics / trackback widgets with a penetration of only about 1.4% across the sample is also surprising - although - this penetration rate probably skews high, as this particular sample was expanded out using Lijit users' blogrolls.  I was also surprised to see book community widget LibraryThing coming in above widgets like Meebo and Last.FM.

Perhaps the most interesting figure for me was to see best in class content widgets like MyBlogLog and Flickr coming in at 15 and 18 percent penetrations respectively.  These are pretty useful benchmarks, methinks.

Hat tip Brad Feld.

Chipin and Virginia Tech

Chipin, the grassroots fund raising widget that SW covered a while back, has partnered with Network for Good to launch a Hokie Spirit  Memorial  Fund Widget.  Chipin is donating its widget to the cause for free.  For a full write up, see the Network for Good Blog Post.   If you have a blog, why not put this widget up?

ChipIn: widgets for fundraising

If you read one SEO post this year...

... read the one linked to below.  Todd Malicoat, aka Stuntdubl, has put together the best collection of content and link building resources that I've seen on the Web.

Couple of Announcements from Widgetbox

The widget platforms continue to innovate.

Widgetbox just made two announcements, timed with the Web 2.0 Expo conference here in San Francisco.

First, they announced Partner Showcases.  Partner Showcases are just what they sound like – centralized landing pages that display all of a given company’s widgets in an attractive format.  These Partner showcases can be hosted on Widgetbox and/or the publisher’s site.

This doesn’t sound like a particularly big deal – especially as Widgetbox was already offering very basic widget developer landing pages that showed all of the widgets from a given developer.

However, from a publisher perspective, it’s actually pretty useful.  The company that I work for has been rolling out new widgets pretty steadily, and is just about to tackle creating a core landing page that displays and explains each of our core widgets.  I can definitely see how a slick, intuitive page that has been put together by Widgetbox’s world class UI team could make this task a lot easier.

Here’s an example of the old developer landing page, and here’s an example of a branded Partner Showcase.

The second announcement from Widgetbox is less presentation, and more substance.  Widgetbox has added a very slick “in the wild” widget distribution toolkit.  Specifically, a prominent “Get It Now” button on every Widgetbox widget triggers a tool that lets end users add (without copying and pasting code) an exact copy of that widget to any of the following sites: MySpace, Blogger, TypePad, Netvibes, PageFlakes, and Google.  There are also options to grab the code, or tweak the formatting of the widget.

The tool worked flawlessly for MySpace, TypePad, Netvibes, and Google.  It didn’t work for Blogger – I’m pretty sure because I’m still using the “old” blogger format, and I didn’t try PageFlakes.  One minor point that I found very clever – after adding the widget to one of my properties, the tool didn’t just close.  It sent me back to the distribution menu, encouraging me to add the widget to another property.  Very nice.

If you'd like to try it out, the Star Wars widget on the very bottom of SW's left hand sidebar has a "Get It Now" link.

In my opinion, Widgetbox has the best centralized widget directory on the market.  With the enhancements made to their “In The Wild” distribution tools, they are pretty darn close to being best in class there as well.  (Clearspring’s in-widget distribution tools are also impressive).

Nice work guys.

Another Thought on MySpace, Facebook, and Blocking Widgets

I'm not going to blow this out into a full post, but here's a quick thought:

The only reason that MySpace can get away with blocking widgets is because Facebook doesn't allow widget embeds at all.  If Facebook were to open up to widget embeds, MySpace would have to tread more carefully about taking things away from their users.

I'm going to go out on a limb and speculate that an opening up of Facebook would not only put 17M new active profiles into play for widget developers, but it would also go a long way towards keeping MySpace open.

StumbleUpon – The Value of Being Distributed

As reported by TechCrunch and GigaOM, website rating and discovery service StumbleUpon has been purchased by eBay at a price of $40-$50M. 

This is one of those exits that makes you feel really good for the founders.  Founded in Calgary, these guys have been toiling away since late 2001.  This was not a blue chip, built to flip, Silicon Valley golden company.  These guys are bootstrappers, and achieved their exit with only $1.5M in funding, which they took only after they had achieved critical mass.

While StumbleUpon may not be a widget company, they do a share a major characteristic of widgetized companies – they are primarily a distributed service.  Here’s an excerpt of a StumbleUpon review that I wrote in March of last year:

I'm amazed how smart people are. StumbleUpon is brilliant. It's one of these neat, social tools that epitomize the whole "web 2.0" movement, and is a great way to discover new Web sites based on stuff you like. The whole key to it is a Firefox extension in your browser that allows you to indicate what web pages you like as you search the web. So it's distributed... this is a big deal, as it goes with you - it doesn't force you go to any destination web site to share your opinion.

Isn’t this what widgets are about as well?  Letting users enjoy content and functionality in the flow of their web surfing experience without forcing them to come to your domain?  Widgets have the advantage of not requiring a download, while toolbars have the advantage of being immune to the whims of a turf protecting host site.

My other immediate thought when I heard about the StumbleUpon acquisition is that this might be an opportunity for some of the other social bookmarking services to make some headway.  StumbleUpon is a tiny acquisition for a business like eBay, and could easily get lost.  There are plenty of examples of surging start-ups that have been derailed by an acquisition.  Dodgeball and Google comes to mind. 

I’ve also been seeing a number of distributed website and blog post rating widgets popping up recently that might benefit from StumbleUpon losing a little momentum.  Blogarate, JS-Kit, and Spotback are all trying to play in this space.  Stumbleupon being taken off the market by a seemingly non-related business could be a real opportunity for these guys.

Congratulations to StumbleUpon on the exit, and it should be interesting to see if eBay tries to jam them into some sort of auction related direction.  If they do, it could be a real opportunity for a distributed discovery / rating service to fill the void.

Widget Universe Expanding?

It’s no secret that perhaps the biggest driver to date in the proliferation of widgets was MySpace’s decision to allow their users to embed widget code in their profile pages.  Companies like RockMySpace, Slide, Photobucket, and YouTube moved quickly to help users take advantage of this freedom, setting the stage for the widget explosion that we’re seeing today.

There are now rumors that Facebook plans to follow suit.  As scooped on the Wired blog and reported by Mashable, Facebook is now considering allowing widget code embeds on its profile pages.

So what does this mean for widget publishers?  Fast Company reports that Facebook is doing over 30 billion page views per month, and had about 17 million active users in March, 2007 (registered users who visited at least once per month).

As an admittedly not quite apples to apples comparison, MediaMetrix estimates that MySpace did about 45 billion page views in February.

Clearly, Facebook’s decision to open up to widget embeds would be the biggest event in widget publishing since, well…. MySpace.  And I think it's the right move.  As I noted in a previous post on the subject of Facebook and widgets:

While it’s hard to argue with Facebook’s success, I’m having a hard time understanding this decision to close off their service from widgets.  Their arch rival MySpace allows freedom to customize profile pages, and it seems to have worked out for them.  Around the Web, open, unstructured services seem to be kicking the asses of services that impose limitations.  Twitter vs. Dodgeball.  PlentyOfFish vs. HotOrNot.  Flickr vs. Shutterfly.  Yahoo! Answers vs. Google Answers.  MySpace vs. Everybody.

But the good news for widget publishers doesn’t end there.  Netvibes has announced that they will soon be launching NetVibes Personal Universes – a new take on their popular start page which allows the publisher to make widgets and feeds viewable to others.  In their current format, widgets in the Netvibes ecosystem need to be built using the Netvibes API – we’ll see if Netvibes allows user widget embeds in future releases.

Finally, at the Web 2.0 Expo yesterday, Dave Sifry reports that there are 120K new blogs being published every day.  That’s 120K new potential widget destinations a day, over 3.5M per month.

So if Facebook comes on board, that could mean as many as 17M profiles looking for bling.  Netvibes' millions of users will soon be in search of outward facing widgets.  And millions of new blogs are going live each month.  That's a lot of new widget real estate.