Sexy Widget

Widgets: Back from the Dead?

If you believe Google Trends, popular interest in the term "widgets" peaked somewhere in the middle of 2007.  Around this time, Google announced that they would be dropping ads into their widg... ahem, gadgets .... and the MySpace widget ecosystem was in full swing.  This was also the period in which Facebook announced their developer platform, whose applications were widely compared to widgets.

A look at this same graph will tell you that interest in widgets has been in gradual decline since then - in fact, we would appear to be at similar levels of interest as we were in late 2005, before the first YouTube widget hit MySpace. 

But just when you thought that those lovable chunks of embeddable code had run their course, widgets now seem to be roaring back.

Data Point #1

At this week's Google I/O conference, widgets played a significant role in each of the morning's keynotes.  On Day 1, Google VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra spoke extensively of "cut and paste programming," and announced the exposing of a whole new suite of widgets, cleverly called Google Web Elements.  Several of Google's most successful properties including search, maps, and calendar, are now available in embeddable, widget form.

On Day 2, it was announced that Google's most ambitious product announcement in some time, Google Wave, will be supported by an embed API.  The key premise here is that the Google Wave format, which is part email, part bulletin board, part IM, and part document, will proliferate via embed to social networks and blogs.

Data Point #2

Widget infrastructure company Clearspring, after several months of quiet execution, has announced that their widgets are now reaching more than 500M users a month, more than half of the Internet's population.  As founder Hooman Radfar says in a blog post:

"...if we were a publisher, only Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have larger reach."

Data Point #3

Union Square Ventures just announced an investment in HeyZap, a distributed social gaming company that, if you believe their site's navigation, is emphasizing proliferation via widgets and APIs over all else.  This is interesting as Union Square Ventures' Fred Wilson, once once of the biggest advocates of widgets, had more recently cooled to them, paring back widgets on his own blog and suggesting that widget makers needed to figure out how to get out of the sidebar and into the river.

To me, HeyZap looks like a good, old fashioned widget play from 2006 - in fact, just like one I covered on this blog.  And I'm not disparaging that - I thought that a YouTube for games was a good idea then, and I think it's a good idea now.

Summary

While one week does not a resurgence make, when thought leaders like Google and Union Square Ventures throw their weight behind widgets (again), and a leading widget company announces the kind of reach that Clearspring did, you have to stop and take notice.

And I have to say, the timing couldn't be better.

As luck would have it, I am moderating what we are calling a Widget Smackdown event in San Francisco on June 17.  Participating companies are: Clearspring and Gigya, iWidgets and Sproutbuilder, and AdGregate Markets and Sellit.  Details will be posted on SFNewTech.

Google Web Elements (Why Can't Google Just Say "Widget?")

I had the pleasure of being at Google I/O this morning, the impressively well run and generous celebration of developers that Google has hosted here in San Francisco for the past two years.

Eric Schmidt kicked things off with the message of "The Time is Now" (to finally realize the dream of the Web as the ultimate programming platform).  Schmidt was followed by a number of senior Google engineering lieutenants as well as a few token engineering executives from companies like Mozilla and Palm.

There was a lot of attention paid to how far the browser has come in terms of speed, as well as the promise that HTML 5 holds for both users and developers.

The portion of the keynote most relevant to readers of this blog was the launch of "Google Web Elements" - an attempt to bring the same embed / cut and paste programming that is available for YouTube to other Google products.  Yes, this is what the rest of the world calls a "widget." 

And no, I am not changing this blog's name to "Sexy Web Element."

Specifically, Google is now exposing embeddable JavaScript snippets for the following Google Products:

- Calendar
- Conversation / Commenting (watch out Disqus, JS-Kit?)
- Custom Search (neat because it isolates the host domain and other domains that you choose, watch out Lijit?)
- Maps
- News
- Presentations (watch out Slideshare?)
- Spreadsheets
- YouTube

Here's an example of the commenting widget:

And here's an example of the custom search widget:

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For more on Google Web Elements, see Technologizer.

Why we Built our own URL Shortener

My employer, RateItAll, recently launched some enhanced sharing tools with the goal of maximizing distribution via email, Facebook, and Twitter.

I will likely share more of the specifics of what we did in regards to sharing in a future post, as I think we're doing some neat things.

As part of our Twitter project, we decided to build our own URL shortener as opposed to using an existing service like Bit.ly or TinyURL.

Here are the reasons we did this:

1. It preserves our brand in tweets.  Our brand happens to say exactly what we do.  It's a description of the service, and hopefully, a means to attract new users.  We felt it was important that our brand be preserved as our service gets tweeted and retweeted.
2. It was easy.  Setting this up for four different types of links took us a few hours.
3. We have a fairly short domain name.  By using our own URL as opposed to Bit.ly's, we don't lose all that much in terms of saving space against a 140 character limit.
4. It protects us against third party services deciding to change the rules.  To its credit, Bit.ly is currently a search engine friendly redirect, meaning that link juice appropriately gets transferred to the destination domain.  There's no guarantee that Bit.ly will stay that way.

You can see our sharing tools and url shortener in action on this page about Star Trek characters.

For more technical posts on URL shorteners, see Joshua Schachter and Danny Sullivan.

Why Facebook / Twitter 2009 are more Defensible than MySpace 2006 or Friendster 2003

I spend as much time as I can hanging out with other entrepreneurs.  The opportunity to do so is a huge advantage that I have living in San Francisco, and it's one that I don't take for granted.  It energizes me to hear what other folks are working on, and to trade stories about the ups and downs of startup life.

And one thing that is increasingly dawning on me is that we are all working on the same damn thing: distribution.

Just about every startup that I come across is working on optimizing their sites / service / content for distribution on Facebook and Twitter.  Sure, old fashioned email sharing is still getting a nod, as are some of the bursty drivers of traffic like Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon, and you'll see the occasional MySpace distribution project - but for the most part, it's all about Facebook and Twitter.

Everyone wants to guide their little streams of content into the larger rivers of Facebook and Twitter with the hopes of gaining more distribution.  Everyone wants to hitch their wagons to Facebook and Twitter's meteoric growth, because as we know, a rising tide lifts all boats.

It's a little unnerving to see everyone working on the same thing - in this industry, it's often the folks that aren't working on what everyone else is working on who thrive.  But I'll save that discussion for another day.

The larger implication of all these man hours going into wiring a myriad of services into Facebook and Twitter's rivers is a fortifying of those two companies against future competitors.  If Facebook's newsfeed comes pre-wired with every popular web service, it's a massive advantage.  If every popular Web service uses Twitter for alerts / notifications / shouts, it will be an almost insurmountable task for a future competitor to take them on.

Fred Wilson posted yesterday that once you become a default behavior, you're tough to knock out.  I will go one step farther and say that if you are a default behavior AND thousands of complementary services have put in serious labor to wire their services to yours, you are sitting pretty indeed.

Social Distribution and Search

There's a post up today from Rafe Needleman reporting on the Churchill Club Top Tech Trends Event, that continues the gathering meme of social media being a threat to search.

Rafe reports that one of the key trends that prognosticators are pushing is that Google's search dominance, which depends on a centralized, black box algorithm to tell you what the best match for your query is, could be at risk to losing out to the distributed, implicit wisdom of the crowds.

Venture capital whiz-kid Steve Jurvetson gave an impassioned pitch for this trend, which he called, "The triumph of the distributed Web." He said the aggregate power of distributed human activity will trump centralized control. His main point was that Google, and other search engines that analyze the Web and links, are much less useful than a (theoretical) search engine that knows not what people have linked to (as Google does), but rather what pages are open on people's browsers at the moment that people are searching. "All the problems of search would be solved if search relevance was ranked by what browsers were displaying," he said.

Jurvetson believes that the future is "federated search," in which the Web's users don't just execute search queries, they participate in building the index by the very act of searching, immediately and directly.

This is a bit farther out than I've been looking recently on my posts on passed links and social distribution.

While I am not sure about how the mechanics might work of a distributed, human built search index, I do know there is value in capturing which links are being passed via social media, which links are getting clicked on, and the themes that are associated with those links.

Hence the interest in Bit.ly and URL shorteners in general.  How long will it be before Bit.ly launches a destination site using the findings of all of their link data?

Socializr's Twitter Integration

Party planning service Socializr has just announced Twitter integration for sharing events.  Here is a brief slide show on their integration - most interesting to me is that they are not only pushing content out to Twitter, but they are also sucking content back in - displaying tweets about an event on that event's page on Socializr.

Socializr Twitter Integration

View more presentations from jhabrams.

Gigya Secures Distribution Deal with Adobe

This was announced a few weeks ago, but it's notable nonetheless.  Widget infrastructure company Gigya has announced a partnership with Adobe to go live this summer in which Gigya sharing and tracking tools will be tightly integrated into Adobe's software:

In the first phase, Project Radiate will make Gigya’s Wildfire technology part of Adobe’s Flash, Flex, and Dreamweaver software, enabling developers to integrate Wildfire distribution and tracking functionality into their widgets at the time they are built. This functionality will be free for anyone who owns a copy of these Adobe products. 

Part two of this relationship will be around monetization - widget publishers will be able to buy installs across the Gigya network.

The second phase will give advertisers and publishers a self-service option for distributing widgets across the Gigya network on a pay-per-install basis.

While I haven't seen screenshots, Liza Hausman, VP Marketing of Gigya explains the integration as follows:

If they (widget developers) develop a flash anything they can drag and drop Gigya sharing tools and analytics in directly from Photoshop etc, and set up an account through Adobe.

A Few Notes from PWC's State of Venture Capital Report

RateItAll's lawyer, Cooley Godward Kronish, hosted a two hour "MoneyTree Report" this morning presented PricewatershouseCoopers (and panel) covering about the state of venture capital in Q1 '09.  They were kind enough to invite me.

The panelists were Stephen Bernardez (ONSET Ventures), Rich Brenner (The Brenner Group), Ted Driscoll (Claremont Creek Ventures), Matt Hemington (Cooley), Prashant Shah (Hummer Winblad), and Santosh Vadivelu (Canaan Partners).

Here are my notes:

• Total venture funding (all stages, all geographies) is down almost 50% Q109 vs Q408
• Silicon Valley accounted for about 40% of the total of all investments in Q109
• Silicon Valley investments are down 43% off Q408, vs 47% for overall investments
• # of deals in Silicon Valley is at its lowest point since Q1 '03
• Top three Industries receiving venture investment in Q109: Software, Biotech, Medical Devices - Cleantech has fallen off cliff since Q408
• Not much investment going to early stage / first sequence deals - Q109 was the lowest amount and number during the 2001-2009 time period, as well as the lowest percentage of overall deals
• The mean deal size has fallen to $5.5M
• Three most active funds in Q1 by number of deals: Oak Investment Partners (13), Draper Fisher Jurvetson (11), Venrock (11) - also notable was First Round Capital (9)
• Total Venture Return handily beating both Nasdaq and S&P 500 over 1, 3, 5, 10, and 20 year periods - however results skewed by top 25% of venture firms which deliver the bulk of the returns.
• Between 2004 and 2007 there were an average of 73 venture backed IPOs.  In 2008 there were 6, 5 of which were in Q1.  None so far in 2009.
• Size of M&A deals plummeting

PWC says the good news is:

• 2008 was the fifth biggest year ever in terms of venture capital investment $$
• Ad $$ still shifting online

PWC's predictions:

• VCs to stop funding many of their portfolio companies
• New deals must be perfect
• Lots of down rounds
• Fewer deals per fund, syndicated deals more important
• VC fundraising problematic, fear of capital calls

The primary panelist messages were:

• VCs moving slower, being pickier
• Terms favoring investors
• Many VCs moving upstream to later stage deals

More on Social Distribution

Over the weekend, there were two exceptional articles talking about how social distribution networks are a rising force, perhaps on the path towards disrupting search's stranglehold on content discovery.

In his piece, "The Rise of Social Distribution Networks," John Borthwick makes the case that content that is getting passed around via social graphs represents a new sort of distribution model:

Today there seems to be a new distribution model that is emerging.   One that is based on people’s ability to publicly syndicate and distribute messages — aka content — in an open manner.    This has been a part of the internet since day one — yet now its emerging in a different form — it's not pages, it's streams, its social and so its syndication.

Om Malik ties social distribution into the related concepts of "real-time web" and fragmentation, to come up with the three bullets that he believes are changing how content is distributed and discovered on the Web:

1. The web is transitioning from mere interactivity to a more dynamic, real-time web where read-write functions are heading towards balanced synchronicity. The real-time web, as I have argued in the past, is the next logical step in the Internet’s evolution. (read)
2. The complete disaggregation of the web in parallel with the slow decline of the destination web. (read)
3. More and more people are publishing more and more “social objects” and sharing them online. That data deluge is creating a new kind of search opportunity. (read)

And while pundits like Malik and Borthwick are digging into the conditions that are allowing content to flow through the social graph, others are noting changes on the output side - in their sites' traffic logs.  In a post called "How Twitter and Facebook Compete with Google," Mark Cuban notes:

For the 1st time ever, more people are finding my blog from Twitter and Facebook referrals than via Google.  The total number of people coming to my blog is increasing. The percentage of people who find it via Google is declining. Significantly.

Fred Wilson, who has written about what he calls "passed links" here, here, and here, notes:

I am seeing links from Facebook and Twitter growing rapidly relative to search links in every refer log I look at. Right now, I am seeing Twitter and Facebook combined at roughly 20% of Google in the average refer log. Six months, that number was less than 10%. Presumably that ratio will continue to grow.

In my recent post, "A Deeper Dive into Passed Links," I note that within RateItAll's 1.2M strong community, traffic from passed links is growing at a much faster rate than organic search traffic.

So what's going on here?

It seems that there have been a lot of little storms brewing that have combined to create the conditions for a larger, more structural change.

On the input / writing side:

The rise of enormous social networks such as Facebook are providing a single venue where real world friends can connect online and share content with their friends.

Falling startup costs are enabling the rise of a wide variety of social media sites ideal for creating and sharing any type of social content - photos, reviews, polls, games, quizzes, bets, news, links, forums , etc.

Cross domain login services such as Facebook Connect and Twitter Connect are lowering the registration hurdle that has traditionally been required for content creation (and providing built in distribution).

And on the output / reading side:

Enormous social networks such as Facebook are providing a single venue where real world friends can connect online and consume the content created by their friends.

The newsfeed / river format is allowing users to easily consume real time content that is relevant to them

APIs are powering the distribution of social media sites and allowing smaller services to push their content into the larger services' rivers / newsfeeds

Widget / sharing infrastructure companies such as Gigya and Clearspring are facilitating the flow of content across domains

In many ways, the proliferation of widgets that we saw in 2007-08 was a precursor to the social distribution networks that we are seeing now.  The same principles of atomization, sharing, distribution, aggregation, and virality are at work, only now the tools are more powerful.  Embed code is being replaced by a submit button.  Shared content is jumping out of the sidebar and into the river.  The passive placement of shared content on static profiles has been replaced by instantaneous distribution straight to the home pages of 10, 100, 1000 followers. 

Everything is faster, better, easier, and more tightly integrated than it was in December, 2005 when the first YouTube widget was embedded into MySpace.  Makes you wonder where we'll be two years from now.

A Restaurant Website with Facebook Connect

The Corner is a hip little restaurant with good food on 18th and Mission in San Francisco.

The owner is web savvy, and has been in the social media headlines for his ongoing struggles with Yelp.

Anyway, The Corner is the first small business website that I have seen with FB Connect implemented.  Why is this cool?  Because you can see the faces of the folks who frequent the restaurant.

I'm a big fan of services that tie the online to the real world, and this strikes me as a nice implementation.