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.
Comments