"By providing a clear roadmap – and business opportunity – for the widget makers, Facebook has just increased it's virtual R&D budget by over $250 million dollars. By welcoming third-party innovation, Facebook will reap the benefit of hundreds of millions of dollars of venture investment – and the Facebook user will have a much richer experience. I'd wager that every widget maker who has previously relied on Myspace for traffic is hard at work this holiday weekend on migrating their application to support the Facebook API."

--Smart guy and now VC Josh Kopelman, asking Is MySpace the next Prodigy? within a discussion of creating widgets users can embed within their MySpace and facebook pages.

Susan sez: IMHO, developing out APIs and building widgets for your core audience base is a no-brainer--but for many services, it's still not yet happening--let's see if the Facebook upgrades will tip this further.

Update: This is all good, but Scott Rafer says widgets do not exist in the FB developers platform.

(Via Mike A)