Web 2.0 Expo - Tuesday, April 17, 2007 Afternoon Sessions
This afternoon I went to a couple of sessions.
1. An Overview of Badges and Widgets: The Fast Rise of Viral Web Parts by Dion Hinchcliffe, Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Hinchcliffe & Company
Before I get into the notes for this talk, a couple of observations. The buzz word widgets can mean
many things. For instance in this talk there was no mention of Konfabulator, now owned by Yahoo, which popularized widgets several years ago nor mention of Apple’s Dashboard widgets which built upon Konfabulator.
In fact the speaker defined widgets as applications embedded on web sites. This is confusing especially if you’ve used Yahoo’s Konfabulator or Apple’s Dashboard which run on top of your desktop. Gadgets being offered by Microsoft or Google can run either on the desktop or on web pages.
Regardless of how you define these widgets, gadgets etc. the point is the viral aspect of them in getting your content, data out there. And all of them are proliferating.
Hinchcliffe offered the following magazine and journal which he contributes to as useful resources.
- Ajax World Magazine
- Web2journal
Ok, now for some notes from the talk;
1. Trends
- portable content and functionality
- Users putting modular web parts on their blog etc.
- limited business value in being a single site (Not sure if I agree with this)
2. Atomization, or reducing of content into small fragments is continuing
- microformats are the smallest pieces
- do it yourself trends
- The webs as a parts “superstore”, the rise of do it yourself (DYI) phenomenon (Coined from ZDNet)
- Spreading your content: API’s, widgets, badges, syndication
3. Building on shoulders of Giants: Leverage widgets and API’s from Google, Yahoo, Amazon etc.
- Second Life uses Amazon’s S3 web service
- “Automated mass servicing” of markets of low demand and content functionality (the long tail)
4. The Lineup
a. Widgets: embedded on the web.
- Can be Ajax or Flash
- Sites: Widget Box, Microsoft Gallery Live
- Turns your app’s functionality and content portable
- Users do work of distributing your product
- supply mashups, blogs, wikis & space
- most successful widget is the Google AdWords widget
b. Badges: Displays content pulled under the covers from other sites
- highly viral
- Yahoo badges
c. Gadgets: More formal widget modules from Google and Microsoft
- Google Gadgets for your desktop
- Google Gadgets for your web page
5. Business Mashups (Hot)
Defined: A mashup is a website or application that combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience. (Wikipedia) Frequently uses API’s to pull content.
Ok to wrap up I”l point up examples of viral badges and gadgets on this site. If you look to the down the right side column of my blog home page you will see a Badge for MyBlogLog and a Gadget for Google Talk.
Afternoon Session 2. Building Awesome Web Sites & Services Using the Power of Happy Users
Basically this was a panel consisting of Ted Rheingold, CEO, Dogster, Inc., Stewart Butterfield, General Manager, Flickr, Yahoo! Inc., Joshua Schachter, Director of Engineering, Yahoo!, and Biz Stone, Obvious
The panel discussed the early days of building their businesses before they got popular and how they dealt with their consumers. The primary answer was be responsive to early adopters of your product by email, IM, phone etc. Of course once you grow to a certain size it’s not possible to offer the type of one on one service you offered at the beginning. For instance one founder would have people cal him directly if they had problems with his service. Obviously as the service grew this was not possible any more. But the point is when you first start out keep them happy. And as you grow find ways to keep communication open with your customers and be responsive to their needs. Other than that I took nothing else of value from this panel.
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