We’ve been a bit slow writing up our trip to the recent Mashup* event on Widgets. Possibly because we’ve been very busy working on what we were demoing - your monster, sitting on your Facebook/Bebo/MySpace page greeting your friends in a monstery way.
The event was really fascinating in many ways. The widgiverse as I now know it’s called seems to be like the web in it’s earliest form. Everyone wants to be there, lots of people have no idea why they want to be there - but are just doing stuff in a flag planting exercise - and a whole load of people are asking about the money.There are definitely some very smart ideas though, and this time round there are better and richer statistics about useage and true demographics.
There was a great talk from Ankur Shah from Techlightenment about the current state of play and the importance of the social graph in understanding the use of your widget and on making the widget more compelling and integrated for users. It was also great to see Ivan Pope expounding on his vision for where widgets are going and about the decentralisation of data. As someone who has to constantly think about storing vast amounts of data and scalability, I personally love the idea that your data is held in little connected pools in different locations and is then mashed up as you want it through the tools and widgets you choose. The experience of the mashup event, when taken in conjunction with the recent O’Reilly report on Facebook apps, gives you a lot of insights into how, what and why users want from widgets.
Our main reason for being at Mashup and being there mob handed (Jack, Jey, Mike, Divinia and I) was to show off the prototype of our little monster widget. The widget’s now on our community page and is also available for you to add on Facebook and Bebo, with MySpace not far behind. It’s in its infancy and we’re working on much more integration with the social networking sites and soon we’ll hopefully be doing some fun bidirectional stuff soon. Let us know as always what you think of the widget, we’ve got some ideas but it’d be great to hear yours.
For anyone interested in the widgiverse, it looks like Ivan’s WidgetWebExpo will be a pretty cool gathering out in New York in June.
