Widgets Live: Event Report

Maybe it's my Crusty Punk past, but much as I love Glastonbury I still hanker for the enthusiast run small free festival. There is something about the sub-mainstream event which harbors a sense of community and honest sense of purpose that just can't be maintained as the crowds get too large.
And so it is with the conference ... Some of the conferences I've attended this year have been great corporate rock festivals of affairs which, have suffered in their laudable strides towards spreading the message to a wider audience from a reduced shared knowledge base such a widened attendee scope engenders. This in turn can lower the quality and value of discussion.

In fact a couple of times I've had the feeling of coming away actually knowing less than I started with.

Today's Widgets Live event has been a real shot in the arm. Rather like Web 2.0 paradigm, the technologies and methods enabling widgets have been around for a few years now but its taken the comparatively recent adoption of a common moniker to focus attention on the paradigm and unite developers of such systems under some palpable notion of industry sector. This despite leading proponents and enablers of the technology variously branding their implementations as widgets, gadgets, modules and parts. Thus we are sufficiently far along the hype curve for an event on the topic to attract a decent attendance and speaker list consisting of those with some domain knowledge but not so far along as to appear on the radar of the completely uninitiated. This higher level or lowest common denominator made for a very stimulating and worthwhile event.
My only real criticism would be that even at this nascent stage the notion of widgets is already in need of sub categorizing into browser bound, desk top, domain specific, open etc.

The event, arranged and organized in just a couple of months was sold out and a quick guestimate suggested around 200 attendees in the room.

First up was the keynote from Arlo Rose of Konfabulator (acquired by Yahoo! Aug 2005) fame who gave a potted history of what ended up as Yahoo! Widgets and generally set the scene as to what Web widgets are all about.
The day's first stab at suggesting business models around widgest prompted by a question for the floor had Rose suggesting the twin drivers of allowing users to move their data anywhere and the publishers ability to reach the user without relying on the browser.

Next up Fox Interactive Media (proud new owners of myspace) announced the launch of Spring Widgets a "widget engine for desk top and web". The product grew out of FIM's own requirement to create a horizontal platform for tie its various services together. Spring Widgets was developed by FIM Labs, a division created to look after acquisitions by providing an environment protected from corporate process thus allowing newly acquired companies to continue to work in the rapid, flexible way they had managed as start ups and small companies.
An SDK is available from springwidgets.com for PC with a Mac version to follow.

Next were a couple of sessions discussing the realities of engineering widgets, firstly adobe giving a quick demo of the ease of development in Flex and the a look at the possibilities and limits developing with open web technologies.

We were then treated to a couple of sessions telling success stories of widget development. Firstly, a look a MeeboMe and the 'widgetisation' of Instant Messaging. Meebo had created a Web base IM client and with their MeenoMe widget they have given the end user the ability to add an IM channel into their own Web pages. The possible uses of such a platform are numerous and the story very impressive.
Next up in this session was a look at how Photobucket has used widgets to gain a presence on other platforms, most notable MySpace. Peter Pham of photobucket mentioned in passing something that may well really start to effect this space, namely the terms and conditions of target platforms which may well effect what widgets introduced to the environment will be permissibly capable of.

The core of the afternoon session was split into three panels sessions which each took on a different deployment segment.
i) Desktop Widget engines (Google desktop, Yahoo! Widgets & Windows vista Sidebar)
ii) Homepage widgets (Live.com, Netvibes, Google homepage)
iii) Blog side bar widgets (Aim pages, Windows live pages, Six Apart, WordPress)

Each session consisted of product overviews followed by a brief Q&A session, mostly covering the same ground of:
i) business models - extending reach
ii) standards - would be good but takes too long
iii) Security - the need for robust security especially to gain a footing in enterprise solutions
iv) Interoperability between platforms - a bit of foot shuffling and whispered toe starting

The Widget aggregators session came next with a quick whip through demos of WidgetBox and Snipperoo. This contracted nicely with the more proprietary and domain specific approaches of the previous sessions and to me at least smacked of the most desirable focus for user adoption promising a more democratized paradigm.

A brief session on mobile widgets featured Nokia presenting Widsets and Opera introducing their browser extensions for widgets with the presentation slides displayed off of a cell phone.

A session on 'Hardware widgets' allowed for a slight change of though direction by looking at Chumby and some of the ideas for embedding proposed by PortalPlayer, providers of the chipsets and firmware behind the ipod among other things.

The day was rounded off with Lightning sessions - Ten 5 minute overviews of new product launches:

1. Gigya - Enhancing email by adding content widgets aimed at making email attractive to the myspace generation.

This idea seems somewhat anachronistic and with scant regard for the extra load on mail servers and space eating of inboxes.

2. Polldaddy - Poll/Questionnaire widget for your web site

This is a very compelling idea and a great example of how a business (Infacta) can use widgets to extend its value, reach and effectiveness.

3. RockYou - Quick overview of widgets for embedding in social network platform pages

Rockview are the most established purveyors of thirds part functionality personalization capability for MySpace.

4. Zazzle - Presented their widget to allow users to embed their 'Zazzle store' product viewer into a web site.

Zazzle is a provider for the long-tail of physical products, offering made to order T-shits etc.Again – a great example of simultaneously extending reach and offering real user benefit.

5. Feedburner - Excellent feed and OPML handling widgets for embedding in web pages, blogs etc

Feedburner have ‘long’ been providing services to allow users to import RSS steams into their blogs and Web pages.

6. GRAZR - GrazrScript easy widget creation for rest functions returning RSS

Potentially very flexible and easy to use method of manipulating RSS.

7. Yahoo! - Announcing publisher.yahoo.com/enhance

8. KLIPFOLIO - Announcing 4.0 release of this widget dashboard, with new docking abilities and cross platform synchronization

9. Freewebs presented their Mooglets widget aggregator

This is a viable attempt at producing an Mac OSX-esque dashboard experience for the browser

10. Goowy - Announcement of yourminis.com browser resident desk top widget environment

Goowy provide an excellent browser based desk top environment this widget focused variant looks to be equally useful and well engineered.

A common theme for the day was the importance of synchronizing of widgets across platforms, such that changes in state made to a widget instance on one computer is reflected on different computer, mobile device or browser. This seems like a no brainer, especially for anyone coming from a 'traditional' web apps approach (where the stateless nature of the environment demands a centralized storage or settings - yes cookies break this model but they aren't a valid approach for systems expecting access from multiple clients) but the reiteration of this point belies an important attribute of the multi-modal widget, namely its straddling of the browser and OS native environment. This new split environmental plane of existence demanding its own code of behavior distinct from a web only or OS only resident app.

And today's conference was brought to your by the number 4000, which seamed to be the claimed number of widgets currently available in many of the environments presented.

One of the questions that remains in my mind is that in a industry predicated on success metrics focused on page impressions, not least because of ad serving requirements of the predominant form of monetization, what happens when users get more of their data directly via widgets? The constrained real estate of widget footprint was constantly mentioned today - there certainly isn't room for bunging banner ads on them!

All in all a very interesting and thought provoking day!