My friend Brad Thompson, who writes the incredibly awesome San Francisco food blog Food Crusader, recently approached me for some help in building a widget for an upcoming Slow Food event.
Not too long ago, I probably would have put him in touch with a developer who could help him build his widget. Brad would have spec'ed out the project, negotiated a price, specified the sites where the widget would need to show up, and probably iterated over a few weeks.
No longer - I just pointed to him to Sproutbuilder. His response?
Whoa - what a great tool! I just made a mockup in like 5 minutes. That's a brilliant site.
There really is demand for the self promotion tools that companies like Sproutbuilder, Gydget, and iWidgets offer. I've long said that an important aspect of Web 3.0 is going to be about tools that allow non-developers to do developer like things - I think this is a piece of that.
