If 2007 was the year in which widgets failed to achieve the status of a significant commercial opportunity, big web companies have not yet decided to abandon hope. Facebook was the main transmitter of applications, little bits of code that allow people to flirt, amuse, and show off to each other. A number of brands trialled these as a new way of engaging consumers, but applications struggled to move beyond the status of 'clever viral marketing'
Microsoft (Popfly), and Yahoo (Pipes) have both unveiled app-based developments in the past few months, aiming to put the ability to create widgets in the hands of the relatively untechical web user, and giving them the ability to incorporate them into their social network pages.
The interfaces work using blocks, each of which acts like a component of a set of toy bricks. You drang the bricks around, and enter some parameters in them, to make a machine that does something. (Behind the interface, each block contains coding that does what the brick says of does.) Blocks include maps, business listings, social networks, news feeds, and video content.
In the name of research, I tried to build my own widget in Yahoo Pipes. I found it relatively easy, despite only understanding about 20% of the options on the page. I made a search tool that finds photos on Flickr of birds tagged with 'London'. This widget can now be accessed via my Facebook profile. If you click on my link, you can see the same search results as I can, or as if you had searched on Flickr yourself. The Microsoft product is very similar in appearance, but requires a bit more practice before you can build anything functional.
Will these new products make mashups and widgets mass-market and lucrative? Personally I doubt it. Apps on Facebook seem to currently have a very short lifespan, with a huge 'long tail' of unadopted apps. The apps listed in the directories are undoubtedly clever, but as a user you probably wouldn't use many of them to satisfy your information needs. And far fewer people are going to bother to try to make an app, rather than just install one that seems cool. Apps can work on occasion, typically for an advertiser as a supplement to a strong creative idea with an audience that is likely to adopt the tool for a period of time. But being inherently permission dependant, apps seem unlikely to achieve a presence for the majority of mainstream brands, and probably won't be the darlings of 2008.
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/
http://www.popfly.ms/
