Archive for April, 2007

Apple TV Widgets via Hack

Patrick April 19th, 2007

Evidence of new uses for widgets, AwkwardTV has released a plug-in for the Apple TV that allows users to install other plug-ins. Once this master plug-in–called Awkward TV Loader–is installed, users can browse and install Awkward TV plug-ins directly from the Apple TV user interface over the Internet. So while the installation of Loader is likely a hack that requires at least a baseline technical knowledge, the discovery and consumption of other plug-ins is quite simple and user-friendly indeed.

Many of the plug-ins are utility applications for managing Apple TV and QuickTime, like the ability to wake other computers via the local area network. Others still are really geeky, like Perlbin, which allows you to run Perl scripts. But several of the plugins might better be called widgets. These include file browser, RSS reader, weather forecast and sports scores. I’m not yet a beta tester (though I’m signing up), so I can’t yet report on how easy or hard it is to install the Loader, or on the actual use of these widgets.

But I can absolutely see a market for these widgets, paricularly a few that make sense in the home media environment. Weather is a perfect example. While listening to my iTunes library over my home entertainment center via Apple TV, I might want to know tomorrow’s weather. Rather than waiting for my local forecast to appear on The Weather Channel, and rather than firing up my home computer to visit Weather.com, I could simply activate the weather widget on the Apple TV.

Other use cases are easy to imagine: After browsing through our movie library on Apple TV and not liking our choices, my family uses Apple TV’s out-of-the-box functionality to view a few movie trailers. We pick one we like, and activate a Showtimes widget that lists our local theaters, movies and showtimes. Take this use case to its logical conclusion, and we should be able to buy tickets to the movie we want to see, right through the widget, courtesy of Fandango or another movie ticket purveyor.

It would not surprise me to see official Dashboard widgets for the Apple TV in the near future. In fact, I’m a bit surprise the company hasn’t provided them already, as it would seem to be a trivial software engineering feat via a simple software upgrade delivered over the Internet. They have already announced limited widget support for the iPhone, and both the iPhone and Apple TV run a modified version of Mac OS X. But Apple has its hands full with the upcoming releases of its iPhone and the desktop version Mac OS X, so it may be a simple matter of resource availability, product road mapping, or some other factors. In the meantime, you’ll have to be satisfied with the Awkward TV solution.

Whether Apple officially releases widgets for Apple TV or not, the bigger picture is the continuing proliferation of widgets into new uses, devices, media, and delivery methods such as Apple TV, Joost, Snap Shots, iPhone, S60 and so on. All manner of companies are realizing the power of allowing users to have greater control in defining their own personal digital experiences.

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Of Note: Facebook, Widgetbox

Patrick April 18th, 2007

According to Wired’s Listening Post blog, Facebook will reportedly allow users to embed third-party widgets on their personal profile pages, opening up a vast distribution channel for content owners, widget syndication companies, and widget developers.

Widgetbox yesterday announced Showcase pages (when I was creating this post, Widgetbox.com was unavailable) which feature all of the Widgetbox widgets for a particular content owner, such as AOL.

Snap.com Introduces Contextual Widgets

Patrick April 17th, 2007

Search engine Snap.com continues to seek innovative ways to distinguish itself from the competition. Last November, they introduced a service called Snap Preview Anywhere (SPA) that allows website owners to display static previews of external sites referenced in links. Appearing as normal links on a website, the Snap.com previews are displayed in small rollover layers. While an annoyance to some (as I observed in some recent usability tests), these previews have been pretty popular, “taking off like a rocket” according to Snap’s own blog, with 1 million website installations and 9 million daily views. The service also appears to be helping Snap increase traffic to its search engine through its integrated “Search the Web” function embedded in each rollover preview.

Yesterday, Snap relegated SPA to an also-ran,making it but one of eight initial Snap Shots, an enhanced version of the service. Snap Shots are similar in functionality (rollover previews of content referenced in a link), but are far more precise in delivering contextual content. Instead of simply showing the preview of a site–which is now handled by PreviewShot (formerly SPA), Snap Shots feature more detailed content, like Wikipedia entries, stock quotes for publicly traded companies, and film industry details from IMDB. Some are more interesting than others, like the PhotoShot, which displays a single photo from a Flickr photostream plus Previous and Next controls.

If Snap can scale the number of Snap Shots available, this service has promise.

  • It could potentially provide users with far more useful information, which may mitigate some of the annoyance or hassle factor. But website owners need to be careful not to overdo it; I’ve visited pages on which its impossible to move my mouse without invoking SPA.
  • Like SPA, said useful information is provided contextually as a link in the text, rather than in a sidebar widget or some other format. This helps draw users attention and should increase the quality of content views.
  • Also as with SPA, users can search the web directly from the rollover, if they have any interest in using Snap as their search engine.
  • Website owners can reduce the amount of visual clutter on their pages that is often the direct result of the proliferation of widgets. (This is a topic I’m addressing in a post that’s taking way too long to write.)

Snap has made a few interesting choices with this new service, particularly the branding of the first few available Shots (in Snap parlance). As mentioned above, PhotoShot is specifically a Flickr Snap Shot, as “www.flickr.com” is included in the syntax for “calling the shots.” (If they didn’t or aren’t planning to use this phrase for marketing purposes, they should.) Why not Flickr Shot? It would seem that both Snap and Flickr would benefit from the brand associations. Or did Flickr simply get in early enough to claim the rights to the generic PhotoShot trademark? Or even pay for its rights? The same could be said for their other initial Shots as well. Another intriguing branding choice: “Snap Shots” uses a character space as a separator, which the sub-brands are mashed together to create one word with two initial caps.

At first glance, its hard to tell whether the URL structure for ProductShot can include affiliate links, which would ostensibly be a financial benefit for the provider ecosystem: site owner > Snap > Amazon. And while StockShot can be configured to display data from a wide variety of sources, the others appear to be limited to one source only. Its also not entirely clear whether Snap will control the development of all Snap Shots or will open the platform to external contributors. While Snap offers a Snap Shots Markup Language (SSML) for “hand coding,” a cursory review of the whitepaper appears to address only a limited amount of customization. Of course, PreviewSnap can display a preview of just about any site, but it has the same limitations that Snap acknowledges simply by releasing Snap Shots.

Publishing Snap Shots appears to be essentially the same as it was for SPA, and is supported by some of the most popular blogging platforms through plugins. And it has a page-based configuration tool to customize Shots with frame colors, presentation and interactivity (link, icon, both), logo, and size of preview, plus several advanced options for turning on or off search, internal links, external links, and all non-PreviewShots.

So will Snap Shots assist users in their quest to find what they want to find? Will they increase the value of a site through contextual content and interactivity? Will they drive traffic to Shot content providers or to Snap itself. Time will tell. But where I see a lot of similarity in widget delivery methods, this is an interesting, innovative approach at least.

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Mobile widgets capturing increasing mindshare

Patrick April 17th, 2007

It started with desktop widgets. More recently, web widgets have taken center stage. Now, signficant attention is begin focused on mobile widgets.

On the heels of last month’s launch of Zenzui–a Microsoft IP Ventures company–Nokia upped the ante in mobile widgets through its S60 platform for Symbian-based mobile devices. Nokia will offer a widget software development kit (SDK), allowing developers to create custom widgets to run on the S60 platform. The widgets will are purported to be based on web standards, and will supposedly make it easy to transition desktop widgets to the S60 mobile platform. The SDK will be available in Q3 2007.

The announcement about mobile widget support on S60 includes a note that widgets for S60 will be distributed through various channels, including WidSets, the mobile widget gallery site. To date, the widgets on WidSets appear to be custom-developed by the WidSets team, the content owners, or both. WidSets provides its own SDK for developers, who can create XML-based widgets for existing web services, or create entirely new widgets through its proprietary language it says is optimized for mobile devices. This apparently marks the first time that WidSets is getting into the distribution of widgets from another source (albeit one from Nokia Ventures Organization).

The mobile widget landscape is starting to shape up nicely. Here is a quick primer:

  • BluePulse: widgets promoted as a part of the BluePulse social networking service for mobile devices.
  • Mobidgets: The “>as-yet-released mobile widget offering of Mobease and WebWag (whose main product competes in the webtop space).
  • MoJax: An AJAX-based widget application framework, this one from mFoundry, a diversified mobile development company.
  • OpenWave: Another AJAX widget software development kit called OpenWave Mobile Widgets, with support for Windows Mobile, Symbian, BREW and other platforms.
  • Opera: Still more AJAX widgets, these for Opera Platform, also based on web standards with the ability to easily transition web content to mobile devices that are supported by Opera.
  • WidSets: Custom mobile widgets for a variety of mobile devices, plus distribution of Symbian S60 widgets.
  • Zenzui: Custom, proprietary “tiles” using Zenzui’s zooming interface for accessing Internet content.

Many of these providers promote their AJAX-based platforms and ease of developing with web standards, each is a proprietary solution in its own right. Content owners must choose between platforms, or be prepared to support many. I’ll delve more deeply into further segmenting the mobtop widget category in a future post.

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Investments in the Widget Space, and an Omission

Patrick April 11th, 2007

While there remains debate in some circles as to whether widgets are capable of producing the returns on investment typically required by venture capital participation, a few VCs are clearly on the pro-widget side of the fence. In my discussion about the segmentation of the widget marketplace, I probably should have included FreeWebs in the Webtop category. FreeWebs allows users, currently at a rate of 20,000 people per day, to create websites essentially from widgets, and they’re now getting 18 million unique visitors per month, according to WashingtonPost.com. And more to the widget point, they offer web widgets as a way to customize sites created on FreeWebs.

But the Washington Post didn’t only remind me that FreeWebs had an interesting widget-related business, it highlighted the fact that they have received $11 million in venture capital. What other widget companies are getting money, how much, and where is it coming from? Here’s a starter list; help me build it by emailing me or replying in the comments..

  • Clearspring: $7.5 million from Novak Biddle, ZG Ventures, Mark jung, Steve Case, Ted Leonsis.
  • FreeWebs: $11 million from Novak Biddle and Columbia Capital.
  • NetVibes: $1 million from Index Ventures, Marc Andreessen, Pierre Chappaz (founder of Kelkoo and Wikio) and Martin Varsavsky (founder of Jazztel, Ya.com and Fon).
  • Slide: Rumor of $20 million from Mayfield, Khosla, BlueRun, and Founders Fund, the latter two of which participated in a first round.
  • Widgetbox: $1.5 million from Hummer Winblad listed, but that was last June. They’ve likely raised more.
  • WidSets: Financial support from Nokia Venture Organization unknown.
  • Zenzui: $12 million from Oak Investment Partners and Hunt Ventures, plus heavy R&D support from Microsoft.

Actually, I’ll need a good bit more time to compile this list, as other priorities demand my attention. But with the investments in widgets made by these companies, Apple, Yahoo, Microsoft, Bebo and others, its safe to say that the widget economy is a $100 million plus market and growing.

Widgets Proliferation Continues: Now on Joost

Patrick April 7th, 2007

I wrote earlier that I expect serious, bankable business models to arise in the widget economy. Even if standalone widget businesses don’t qualify as investment capital-worthy enterprises, the use of widgets will play a key role in new technology products. One such example is Joost. What does Joost have to do with widgets, you ask? It turns out that Joost supports widgets of a sort.

It calls them widgets, anyway. While using Joost, you have the ability to view My Joost. A key element of My Joost is the ability to show or hide one or more of a small collection of widgets. These include Notice Board, News Ticker, Invite Friends, and Channel Chat, which allow you to engage in real-time text chats with other Joost users about the channel you are currently watching, sort of a real-time social network for watching television.

The Joost widgets only work when you are in full-screen mode, and they overlay the broadcast in an elegant, understated fashion. The number of widgets is rather limited today, but remember that Joost is only in beta. It seems likely that Joost has included widgets as a part of their product architecture so they can easily extend it in the future with new features delivered by the widget capability.

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Alpha Beta Includes Widgets

Patrick April 7th, 2007

The beta release of Alpha, a new search engine from the Yahoo guys down under, features widgets as a key part of the experience. The main search results appear in the main content section of screen, as you would expect. But instead of the sponsored results that appear in the right-hand column of familiar sites like Google, there are a number of widgets delivering search results specific to the widget’s focus or parameters.

The widgets include Yahoo web search, Flickr photos, Yahoo Answers, Yahoo News, YouTube, Wikipedia, and Sponsored Results.These are referred to on Alpha as “info sources,” and a “Customise this page” link on the results page allows users to determine which info sources are displayed along with results. All of the the currently available info sources are set to display by default, but you can remove them. You can also drag-and-drop them to rearrange them on the page. For example, the Yahoo web search widget is set to display as the main content element on the page by default, with all the others showing in the right column; if you are more interested in news results, you can swap the two.
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The Future of Software (or, On “How to Widget?”)

Patrick April 5th, 2007

Last night, I revisited Fred Wilson’s post entitled “How to Widget?” Something about the post has been bouncing around in my head since I first read it a couple of weeks ago. Not the bit about feed-based architectures, though I’d argue that Fred takes the “create once, publish anywhere” mantra a bit too far down the value chain. Fred seems to be arguing that creating a feed is the equivalent of writing, not of publishing, when in my view, it is clearly the latter. A feed is not the atomic content unit in an of itself, its a distribution method, just like a website, an email newsletter and a widget. The key is to store that content in a standard, open format so that it can be easily distributed via these methods and more, such as APIs to other sites, mobile devices and even traditional media.

But I’ll leave that debate for another time (or for Hooman). Before Fred concludes that widgets should be built on a feed-based architecture (and ultimately, there is something to the idea that feeds can be a key enabling technology for widgets), he references his earlier four rules on The Future of Media:

  1. Microchunk it - Reduce the content to its simplest form.
  2. Free it - Put it out there without walls around it or strings on it.
  3. Syndicate it - Let anyone take it and run with it.
  4. Monetize it - Put the monetization and tracking systems into the microchunk.

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Segmenting the Widget Economy

Patrick April 5th, 2007

I’ve spent a fair amount of time exploring the widget economy in recent weeks, and it occurs to me that there is no easy way to describe the various mutations of widgets that are spawning across the software universe. Intuitively, I wanted a framework on which to better understand the various ways in which widgets are evolving. So I sat down and tried to create one. The landscape is changing daily, so my work here may be outdated as soon as its published, but I find the following widget market segmentation intriguing.

  • Desktop: Apple, Opera, Windows, Yahoo
  • Webtop: Google, NetVibes, PageFlakes, YourMinis
  • Netttop: Clearspring
  • Pubtop: Blogger, Typepad, Widgetbox, WordPress
  • Mobtop: Koloroo, Opera Mobile, Widsets, Zenzui

The examples in each of these segments is not meant to be exhaustive. To be sure, there are many other purveyors of widgets that fit into each. Perhaps one day, I’ll attempt to quantify the widget universe further and create a detailed list. In the meantime, read more to learn how I define each of these segments.

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Niall on Google Gadgets, Version 2.0

Patrick April 3rd, 2007

Niall Kennedy takes another look at the Google Gadget Ecosystem, comparing March’s results to February’s, and at a higher level, Google to a few other players. Google’s Gadgets grew in volume by 15%, compared to 7% for NetVibes, 3% for PageFlakes, and -20% for Windows Live. Views of Google Gadgets grew 36%.

My main takeaways from Niall’s analysis

  • The number of gadgets in Microsoft’s directory actually decreased. I wonder what is going on here.
  • NetVibes and PageFlakes in particular have some catching up to do.
  • The Fortune Cookie gadget grow more than 20,000%!!! I may have to add that to my personalized Google page to see first hand what all the excitement is about.

Also notable, Google Gadget pageviews grew 36%, evidence that the widget market in general continues to gain traction.

Opening Day Done, Widgets Still Working

Patrick April 3rd, 2007

Michael Calore over at Wired has a nice roundup of baseball-related widgets to satisfy the need for baseball fans of every stripe. I’m not really a baseball fan, and my interest in the NBA is limited to following the Washington Wizards (hey, get the Gilbert Arenas player widget!), so with the end of the NCAA basketball season last night my sports viewing will be limited to the golf majors between now and the start of football.

Still, if I was a baseball fan, I’d be looking closely at this list. Calore gets the idea of multi-platform widgets, identifying scoreboards for Apple Dashboard, Google Gadgets, and the Yahoo Widget Engine, and offers some limited advice on how to create your own widget. Baseball fans rejoice, and I’ll see you in October!

Clearspring has a new President & COO

Patrick April 3rd, 2007

Clearspring, one of the early leaders in the widget syndication space with deals from content providers like NBA.com and CBS, has a new President & COO. Jay Rappaport, most recently president of Vonage America, is also a former executive at America Online, where he led several different divisions. This is a major deal for Clearspring and the widget space in general, as it signals a continuing investment and interest in the market.

yourminis attempting tri-fecta widget strategy

Patrick April 2nd, 2007

Like NetVibes and PageFlakes, YourMinis allows you to customize a collection of personalized web pages by dragging, dropping, configuring and arranging widgets. Content includes a wide variety of information sources–from major media outlets like ESPN, CNN and The New York Times–as well as fun stuff like a live webcam from SeaWorld.

But YourMinis is taking a broad-sweeping widget strategy, competing not only in this webtop category, but also taking on the WidgetBox Blidget service for turning any blog into a widget, and going head-to-head with the established desktop platforms: Apple’s Dashboard, Yahoo’s Widget Engine and Microsoft’s Windows Vista Gadgets. This is the first of what appears to be a comprehensive multi-platform widget strategy.