For Widgets Sake!

Widgets or Gadgets as they are known are the more recent addition to Web 2.0's growing evolution. They allow companies both great and small to tap into almost any platform going. Whether that be your dashboard widget for Apple's MAC OS X or Windows Vista, desktop widgets like Yahoo! Widgets Konfabulator, web based iGoogle or Netvibes, mobile widgets, social media widgets for Facebook, Myspace your blog or website. Get the idea! They are every where. Widgetbox’s directory has about 7,000 widgets. And, yes, there is volume. RockYou is pushing 100M/day.

I personally use a number of widgets on my desktop; The London Underground Widget telling me about any delays or lines down; a currency converter and weekly weather forecast. These all serve a tidy and precise purpose making my life easier by providing me with fresh information in an environment I spend most of my day using whilst offering some ‘service related’ branding to the supplier. A true win win situation.

However I am getting frustrated by the growing number of pointless and empty widgets coming into existence. Due to the sheer volume they are firstly cluttering widget directories making it hard to find any that may be of use but more importantly, and from a digital marketer’s perspective are warping the public and industry professionals understanding of their actual purpose. As far as I’m concerned; from a suppliers perspective they should be an extension of your business offering not your business offering and from a users perspective they should give you some form of live information, to a lesser degree allow you to share information, without you having to leave an environment you inhabit.

Facebook is a perfect example of widgetmania gone wrong. Whilst it is arguably responsible for their more recent volume burst and high level of public interest I believe it now to be damaging the very fabric of widgets. Initially I loved Facebook’s strategy of opening up their 'API' for developer’s great and small to innovate and essentially ‘improve’ their product offering. Acting like a global and totally free R & D department.

Whilst there has been widgets with some phenomenal ‘success’ an example being the popular ‘Where I’ve Been’ interactive map, now available to Myspace users, that appears as a world map on a users Facebook profile page displaying the countries they have lived in or visited which they can share with their friends. Very basic really and of little interest let alone interactivity. However at last count it had 2.5 million facebookers using it and was sold to TripAdvisor for a staggering $3million. So ok it’s branding at $1.2 a head, they already have a travel business, I can see the logic. Although I think they forgot, or were misinformed, on one vital detail that these things have, generally, a very short life cycle.

Any regular facebookers will have at least one annoying 'friend' like I do who seems to find every widget so interesting he invites all his friends to use it. 34 in all. No matter how inane he keeps on adding, like one that makes you a facebook vampire infecting others with the vampire widget. Does that make it VIRAL marketing? Needless to say he is no longer a friend and he has left me craving a widget to deal with pointless widgets.

To surmise these kinds of widgets to me are a waste of time and space but it’s also taking important eyes off the core essence of what a widget is or does and has possibly limited what the marketing mechanic could do if worked with best practice. A saving grace is that widgets without an existing business behind them generally don’t make their creators any money and in fact cost them a lot in hosting with their fashionable rise in popularity and related traffic. As an example the iLike widget required the operators to install 100 additional servers within 3 weeks of operation. They had a business proposition but most don’t.

Will this 'widget-wobble' correct itself? Well I believe it will but some ‘businesses’ are going to learn the hard way and at the expense of social media as a whole.