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.
