Widget/Blog vs. App/Facebook

I played with widget a few months ago then stopped after I assumed I know enough of it. And I found this little article I wrote before about my experience with it.

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OK. I had played with widget since I believe it's a key distribution technology today and in near future. I tried Yahoo! widget and the Spring box Widget. I always intend to use service from start-ups than from established players since I am doing start-up myself. But theSpringbox disappointed me by not providing search function in their website. Yeah, maybe you only have a few widgets available at each category. But, hey, I want to search for widgets. OK?

So, Yahoo! widgets wins my desktop.

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Accidentally, I checked those widgets things again and find out The Spring Box does support widget search now. That's cool.

And just a little more rumbling about widgets:

1. While everyone is crazy about Facebook applications, I see it's the very similiar craziness about widgets a few months ago. It's all about a platform + application play. widget is basically "application" built for blog platform, no matter you are Google Blogger, Wordpressor Drupal. While Facebook app is built for Facebook platform. Also I read the recent news that Apple had released a quizz plugin for its popular iTune software. I am wondering when there will be a high time for that ...(For developers, here is the API)

2. Widget is also a distribution platform. And for content wanna fit well into the widget platform, it has to be very simple. Rss is clearly a good fit here. It also promotes Fred Wilson's future media play.


3. There are three stages about Internet in my mind. 1st is to generate content when there is nothing. So we got web 1.0 and now we have a everyone-blogging phenomenon. 2nd is to help people find it when there are too many content so we have Google, yahoo and powerset etc. 3rd in my mind is content utilization, visualization/presentation that anything helps people to best leverage the existing content. For many people, whether a Google search can return 1M or 100K links are all the same. Information overwhelming...Yeah, this is the foundation for my upcoming startup! So this widget/distribution thing is a backbone underneath it? Then it should have a bigger impact than Facebook applications which only exists on Facebook platform.


Btw, for Facebook, per their recent bookswap application, wondering are they inevitably will fall into the same trap as Microsoft had done before: competing with other application developmen companies. A sad thing, is it.