So Widgety Goodness, the widgets conference in Brighton that took off on a phrase and on a 2006 blog post I wrote--happened last week in Brighton, UK.
It was kind of a trip to send a video instead of show up (not that I had time to travel to London), and it was super cool to see the video projected at the conference start (just wish I had a link so you all could hear it)
Sounds like it was interesting, with comments on the event available here and here and YouTube videos here.
I've been writing about--and fascinated by--microformats, APIs, structured data and widgets for about 3 years. so sometimes the amazement and mystification of other folks working online around the concept of widgets just baffles me. (See my/a June 2006 post on widgets here.)
To make a widget, you need a good API, and an easy build procees (a tool) that allows you to build a widget, applet or some other kind 0of microformat that is interactive and that provides a means for you to quickly embed and syndicate data and services to URLs not your own.
That's it, period.
So why the amazement? (And why wouldn't any business owner and/or developer in their right mind want to go down this road: APIs, microformats, build tools--nothing risky any any of 'em.
It's almost bibical.
Feeds(RSS) begat outliners(OPML)
Outliners begat tags
Tags began microformats
Microformats begat APIs
APIs begat widgets
Widgets begat start-ups
And the great mash up settled over the land.
Serial start-up mavens Scott Rafer and Oren Michaels have a new start-up named Mashery (guess what they do?)
Richard MacManus has a long post today on widgets. Richard writes: "I too have been tracking the growing importance of widgets, especially as it relates to the Personalized Start Pages space - Microsoft Live gadgets, Google's modules, Netvibes and Pageflakes, and of course Yahoo's konfabulator (although not yet integrated in a big way into MyYahoo)." and " Nowadays it's all about The Two-Way Web App! You can interact and 'write' to any number of small web services-driven apps."
And Yahoo, of course, is supporting microformats, as the local/maps team points out.
Susan sez: Widgets could be flavor of the moment, but the ways that some widgets intersect with structured data (as opposed to intersecting with flashy, AJAX DHTML fancy effects) is one of the things I find compelling (Yes, I am fascinated by microformats, in particular).
For those less geeky than I am clearly becoming, what's the deal here? And why should you care?
Well, for one thing, widgets (and microformats) offer the opportunity for users-and small business people, among others--to embed applications and dynamic apps into their pages/sites. If you hang around myspace, you see videoplayer widgets(think youtube), slideshow players ( rockyou) that have been cut and pasted in by users --and swickis, a eurekster product I worked on--are everywhere. So if you have content or tools, wouldn't you want users to be able to export them? And if you have APIs, don't you want people to build widgets with them--and then distribute those?
Viz, bibical.
