We haven’t talked much about Widgets on Knitware. Graham mentioned sharp’s latest Aquos Net widget TV, but I think they probably deserve more dues. I’ve been building a website for my wedding for some time now; I just wanted it to be a simple and easy to use site that tells people where the hotels are and how to get to our little corner of England. The problem is that I was desperately ill equipped to design a website. Flash, HTML, Javascript and other webscript are all alien languages to me. To satisfy this demand amongst ignorami like me, there are a number of sites and apps out there which offer you off-the-shelf site building. I chose iLife’s iWeb application which a friend pointed out to me. As with all things Mac, it was intuitive and simple so within minutes I had stolen my brother’s .mac membership (£70/yr) and published my own website. But iWeb’s intuitiveness is a tradeoff for more advanced features.
I found that my site looked nice enough but didnt have the functionality I wanted. How could a beginner like me add advanced functionality? How did I get an interactive map on it? How could I offer visitors a guestbook? What about a forum? Or a countdown to the big day? What about tracking? iWeb was designed for iLife and .Mac users: photos, blogs, podcasts and movies, and that’s about it. But luckily they have included a magic door to the rest of the world wide web in the form of “HTML snippet”. Step up the widget.
As I said, if web script was a foreign language (isn’t it?), I wouldn’t say I was fluent. HTML is as good as Sanskrit to me. The joy of widgets is that other people make them, and you just copy the HTML code to your site (most sites even copy it to the clipboard for you). Mac users have long been familiar with Widgets but these were mostly restricted to the Dashboard. Now you have the ability to gobble them up from sites like Widgetbox, meaning that all the things I couldn’t do for lack of HTML know-how, I now can. flickr doesn’t know how to put its photo maps on my personal website, but some clever sausage at worldreviewer.com does. iWeb doesn’t offer a guestbook service, but mapservices.com does. iWeb’s photo slideshow is okay, but slide.com’s rocks. All of this I found in one place, Widgetbox, and all for free. And there are plenty of other sites (Widsets, yourminis, Konfabulator, to name a few), some of which let you import from iGoogle’s extensive widget library widgets and customize it for your own site or your personalized homepage such as Netvibes, iGoogle or Bubbletop.
So now, personal sites for newbies can be richer, slicker and more engaging and all I can say is thank goodness for widgets.
But widgets can go also provide brands with great opportunities. Most online ads are banners. And most of these deadly dull. But why can’t a widget be an ad? Widgets are easy to develop, but can offer so much more than a banner. Not only can you interact with the widget, but you can subscribe to it - ie add it to your own site/blog/myspace/facebook/iGoogle - effectively you are spreading it and letting the widget/ad live on, well beyond the advertisers media spend pulls it offline. Super Mario is the most subrscribed widget on Widgetbox. So what opportunity does this present gaming companies? What if they could widgetise their first level, or a teaser level? When Nintendo release Mario Kart Wii, wouldnt it be cool if you could subscribe to the original Mario Kart? Instead of just designing your Nikes on nike.com, why not let your friends see your designs on your myspace page? Or show off the interior of your new Mini on your Facebook profile? Widgets have been widespread for a few years now, so it’s surprising digital agencies have not embraced widgets more for this role. I’d love to be proved wrong. Let us know of any examples of smart marketing widgets you’ve come across.
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