Speaking of Implicit Widgets: Here Comes Spotplex

The other day I was lamenting the fact that we hadn’t seen much new innovation recently with widgets that are powered by implicit data.

Enter Spotplex.

The easiest way to think about Spotplex is as an implicit powered, distributed Digg.  Instead of the crowds voting on interesting content by clicking a button, with Spotplex, they vote with their eyeballs – that is to say, users vote implicitly by what they choose to read.

The key to the Spotplex service lies in its analytics driven widget.  The Spotplex widget collects page load data from blogs, and sends these figures back to Spotplex home base, where hottest articles are aggregated across a number of categories such as Tech, Business, Sports, etc.

So why would a blogger choose to install the Spotplex widget?  Well, there are a couple of reasons.  Initially, the main draw is that the Spotplex widget displays which of your posts are drawing the most interest within a set time period.  You can see the widget in action in the left sidebar of this blog.

Unlike the Criteo auto roll widget which helps your readers discover similar content on other blogs, the Spotplex widget helps your readers discover interesting content on your blog.

While this functionality might be enough to earn some blog real estate for the Spotplex widget, there’s another compelling reason that bloggers might want to take this widget for a whirl.

Traffic.

By adding the Spotplex widget to your blog, your blog’s posts get put into circulation on the Spotplex destination site, and can earn additional exposure for your blog.

This is a nice example of the hub and spoke and strategy that I’ve discussed in previous posts where the destination site and the widget network are working in concert to provide value to the widget host, thus providing a reason for blog publishers to grant your widget real estate.

I really like this widget.  I get it.  I understand the value for my blog.  And I appreciate the potential future benefit of driving additional traffic to my blog via the Spotplex destination site.

And because it’s powered by implicit data, nobody has to do anything that they weren’t doing anyway for the service to work.

For more, see Mashable and Computer World.

Comments

[Will]

Pretty neat widget. I've been following your implicit arguments of late, keep 'em coming! From the widget developer's perspective, I think it gets truly interesting when the tools that can provide the infrastructure for managing this kind of thing from within your own widgets become available as part of the platform plays. In other words, as widgets migrate from simple UI goodies into actual distributed apps with the kind of capability you're discussing, the difficulty of building them increases (obviously). Because widgets though have a much greater tie-in with your personalization needs and expectations than, say, web apps that you might use on your own (which noone but you really sees and which don't reflect on you), the things that can turn users away from any one implementation can be much different than you see in other spaces.

Bottom line, I think this implicit stuff is really going to take off once the backends and tools frameworks become easy/available enough such that enough folks can build widgets like these, and offer the users a wide enough range of choice, to let them be adopted. As it stands, there are still a few too many barriers to mass adoption of these kinds of smarter widgets because there are such limited choices, and choice matters a lot more in the widget space.

Anyway, one perspective. Keep up the discussion, am enjoying following it.

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Bottom line, I think this implicit stuff is really going to take off once the backends and tools frameworks become easy/available enough such that enough folks can build widgets like these, and offer the users a wide enough range of choice, to let them be adopted. As it stands, there are still a few too many barriers to mass adoption of these kinds of smarter widgets because there are such limited choices, and choice matters a lot more in the widget space.