« Testing out the YourMinis beta release | Main | Web 2.0 - quick summary »
November 06, 2006
WidgetsLive
Om + Niall's Widgets conference was good today - potentially even more forward thinking than tomorrows Web 2.0 conference. A long time ago my partner Javier talked about Userplane as a company without a consumer website, that talked to millions of users daily through distributed "apps". We built that company over the past 3 years - and ironically now that company's distribution strategy has a name - widgets.
Overall the widget market has two faces:
1. Places to Put Widgets (personal homepages, start pages, profiles, etc)
2. Actual Widgets
This all ties back to the further customization of the personal web, my personal information aggregator - and the incredible trend of the personal profile. Originally I felt this trend was completely the responsibility of MySpace trends - but now I feel the genesis is greater. Personal homepages have been around for quite some time - now maybe since the web world is open that was the shift that allowed these secondary markets to be created.
It could be argued that there really are two types of widgets:
1. Widgets for me
2. Widgets that represent me to others
Although I am sure there is overlap - my guess is each widget will really live in one of those two primary categories.
Posted by Michael Jones at November 6, 2006 10:18 PM