Blame Pete Cashmore for distracting me with this news about “Widget Disruption”:
Netvibes (a French Widget-based personal homempage service) is going to treat it’s 10 million users to some new functionality, allowing them to post their Netvibes Widgets on popular social networking sites, blogs, etc.
Great quote from Tariq Krim, Netvibes’ CEO:
Widgets are killing the Webpage. It is time to go to something else. We are entering the widget economy. We are going there no matter what.
But there’s more! The Next Net article also mentions Netvibes’ plan to launch a “Universal Widget API,” which will allow Widgets to share data and synchronize amongst themselves. And they’re adding social networking, which we can only expect will be Widgetized and distributable.
Check out this synergistic tidbit from webwag: you can hack Widget URLs from Netvibes and Google IG and post them on a webwag page.
Is someone standardizing all this Widget interaction? I hope so, because as Pete Cashmore writes:
Once all the startpages support the same widgets, how do you choose between them?