Trying to follow…

It is my second day in Berlin and just found the time to blog about the conference. In all not so bad although some presentations were a bit old or a bit to simple. But also some nice surprises, like the evolution amazon is undergoing or should I say started as a service company. It is nice to see that a lot of other companies are following that track.

The ginger presentation of Tariq Krim was not so good but the topic is interesting and more compelling. How to combine the social networks. Unfortunatly, it is about combining the networks with widgets like Google Open Social. And not yet about creating a network with the facebook profile pages, the meebo communication, the twitter statusses, the gmail mail app and many other services… That ’s more like it but widgets can be the first step. If they beccome bigger and more complex, the services become the added value and the networks become reality and I think I’m coming close to web 3.0 then…

Still a lot of tracks to follow and some interesing people to meet. Keep you posted…

A google web seminar called ‘away with applications the Death of the desktop’ is actually a very nice piece. It goes about the desktop apps as we know them and that is has become to expensive to really recreate the ‘office’ apps as they exist today. The support and release management of those tools and the low acceptance (in UI terms of course) are also cumbersome.

In the future the presenter predicts more apps made out of services. Instead of photoshop of XXXGB we get just the services needed on the fly and always the best version. All the services plug in in a central platform that hosts the file.

It is actually the ultimate personalisation widget, even internet becomes slowly a commodity. You will forget when you are online or not (as we already do), but you will also just install a small base for access to the local file system. The rest will come from internet, a la gears even offline.

Sounds like a very realistic future to me. Even taking the business models into account, which is most of the time the benchmark for succes. But it will need some years of cultivation before it starts to work?

Presentation can be viewed at google video or here.

Rabobank gaat dus ook de widget tour op. Binnen dit en enkele jaren gaat het web ge-atomiseerd zijn. Geen pagina meer maar widgets, die hun eigen interactie en layout hebben.

Het leuke aan widgets is dat ze verschillende technologien verenigen. webservices, ajax,… maken het mogelijk om die widgets te maken met hun eigen data en services. Het belangrijkste wordt dan een platform te hebben voor die widgets en de interactie tussen de widgets bevorderen. Voorlopig zijn het vooral personalisatie platformen die de kar trekken maar er zit zeker toekomst in de andere mogelijkheden van zo een platform.

Ik ga  er toch eens over moeten nadenken.

I liked the definition posted on snipperoo.

“A widget can be anything. There won’t be any centralised production method or certification system, that would miss the point. Any bit of code that can be inserted into a site and which does something is a widget.
In the widgetsphere, there are three issues and they apply to all widgets. Value and Distribution.
Value is the value of the widget to the person who has to make a decision to insert that widget into their (limited) site real estate. The value can be direct (AdSense), indirect (gets traffic, subscribers) or emotional (esteem, kudos)or a mixture of these. Without value a widget will not get installed anywhere.
Distribution is how it actually gets installed, i.e. cut and paste, auto-insertion, walled-garden drag and drop.
So you can be in the Value business or you can be in the Distribution business (or both).
The value business is really the realm of marketing and/or advertising folk and I expect to see marketing companies jump on this big time. How do you create a widget that carries value, that will get big time adoption and that gives a ROI. This already is a specialist field without any specialists in it, but it looks very interesting.
Distribution is something different, how do you reach everyone who may want to insert your widget? How do you make it easy for them – not only to insert it, but to remove it again. Can you automate this process. How about widgets that auto delete. How about widgets that only show in response to certain conditions, or to certain visitors. This is a distribution issue. This is wehere Snipperoo is operating.
There is another issue, where several companies are operating, but its a red herring. That’s the area around ‘how do you make a widget’. As I said, a widget can be anything that will run in a web site. There are millions of people in the world who can build them using whatever technologies the like. Anthing that cramps this resource will not fly. That’s why Snipperoo are technology agnostic. We are the universal widget.”

A nice article that says it all about the upcoming widget hype. ClearSpring is a company that already has the right names in line. Now it is just waiting to get going. I think that widgets will be the next big thing on the internet and perhaps change it again. At least the business models will be changed by widgets and clearspring will be extremely well placed. the full article can be found via delicious tags but here are some quotes.

“According to Clearspring founder, Hooman Radfar, this is a first of kind deal between a widget platform and a media giant. In the interview earlier today, Radfar said that he sees this as a major step towards breaking silo/portal approach and embracing distributed content strategy for NBC.
According to Radfar, the platform has already served over 3 billion widgets. These numbers and Clearspring’s approach to the market is what attracted the interest of former AOL founders who recently led the second round of investments, putting together over $5.5 million. So what does Clearspring offer?

The company has build highly scalable platform for creating, maintaining and distributing widgets. Unlike Widgetbox, which we recently covered, Clearspring does not focus on building a widget marketplace, instead it focuses on building a platform for developers. Here are the is what the company advertises to developers:

• Write once run anywhere
• Automatic viral sharing of widgets across destinations
• Support for major social networking and blogging platforms
• Support for desktop and mobile
• Visual and API-based setup
• Content distribution across the web

All of these are compelling, but tracking, API and content distribution deserve special attention. Clearspring’s tracking is statistics on steroids. The information about widget usage gets sliced and diced across each and every possible metric that you can imagine. It’s a useful and powerful tool for understanding the audience and how it interacts with the widgets. The API (application programming interface) offering means that companies can provide a better user experience. This is particularly useful for widgets that need to be configured through an application. Finally, the content distribution means that widgets are automatically going to be syndicated to galleries and sites across the web.”

“During my interview with Radfar, he emphasized the shift he is observing in media companies. He says that these giants are recognizing that broadcasting/silo approach is not going to work for much longer. Instead, the companies are looking for platforms and channels to access the users, to get people’s attention anywhere online (this is something NBC rival CBS has also been doing — in fact, CBS is another Clearspring partner). And this is where Clearspring comes in.”"

“When NBC starts building on Clearspring’s platform, it will get a solid platform for delivering widgets to both its internal sites and anywhere else online. The scalability of Clearspring platform has probably been the first major factor in choosing to work with the startup. The second major factor was probably comprehensive metrics. According to Radfar, these metrics are critical in order to be able to monetize the content outside of the typical network portal environment. He explained that context and user interaction numbers will help NBC determine the right monetization model.”