Techcrunch points to an interesting Widgets overview on Yahoo’s Widget blog.
I’ll repeat the comment that I made on the Techcrunch blog to write that beyond all the hype, Widgets are still in their infancy, and engineers are still figuring out how to identify and leverage their strengths.
In addition to my earlier post describing Widgets as the Internet’s potential “connective tissue”, I think Widgets are interesting as a more pure implementation of the Ajax philosophy; they’re truly asynchronous.
With Widgets, we’re starting to see a hack that gets us past some of the big problems with an Internet based on HTML pages rendered by browsers:
- Widgets shift the ownership of a user’s “state” from pages to users
- Widgets make websites invisible and make their services visible
The next interesting implementations won’t come from people who are asking “what kind of flashing light can I put on your blog or website?” Instead, they’ll come from people asking “what kinds of constraints and inefficiencies am I taking for granted when I think about web content and applications?”
I think we’re already seeing this with disruptive technologies like RSS feeds and mobile devices. I expect that we’ll see many real Widget innovators rise above the noise in the coming year.
I’m not sure I really understand what a widget is I don’t think. Isn’t it just a piece of display code that draws from a source other than the requested server? I can’t really figure how your assertions fit into this model. Basically the ‘page’ is still just a jumble of HTML rendered by the browser. Ajax allows for some dynamism in the display by introducing a pseudo client-server model, but the website remains stateless in a purely technical sense, right? What am I missing here?
I have to admit when I hear “widget” I feel the same bile rising as when I hear marketing buzzword. To me it doesn’t seem like anything revolutionary at all is happening. Again, what am I missing?
Yes, a Widget is exactly a piece of display code that draws a source from another server – both content and application data.
One of the constraints of a website though is that it’s functionality is restricted to a specific domain and context. Widgets can function cross-domain – Google Adsense is a great example of this functionality, as is their Urchin tracker. But the repeated implementations give Google cross-domain knowledge of user behaviors, and potentially cross-domain functionality.
The revolution is less the “how” and more the “what”. As user agents begin to really support JavaScript and long-tail content creators go searching for free site functionality, Widgets increase in presence and power, opening the door for new products like MyBlogLog.