If you want to know where all this 2.0 stuff is going, you could do worse than keep a very close eye on the Widgetsphere. Why? Widgets in their pure sense represent all that is right about online and how it is changing our lives. I call it the 'Give and Take Web' for good reasons. We don't just take what we want from the internet, we give back what we've got. Most of the successful tools of recent years allow us to define ourselves online, to be who and what we are rather than to allow companies and their marketing to define us. To a large degree, that is why the whole thing is so powerful. So, MySpace, YouTube, eBay, even Google, they all allow you to be what you are or what you want to be rather than imposing on you somone's idea of what you should be.
One of the key things that defines what you are is how you represent yourself online. So your blog or your videos or your items for sale or your friends all define how you see yourself and how you want others to see you. Some platforms, like eBay, MySpace, flickr or Blogger, allow you to set out your stall, to show who you are. Others, such as YouTube, flickr and many others, allow you to pick out what others have produced and integrate them into your world. A third kind of resource allows you to give away your own creations for others to integrate. Some sites do all three, some do one. The essential factor here is the economy of exchange, of give and take. During the give and take you are defined and you define yourself. It's a fluid mechanism, there is no finished work, so you need the method of definition to allow you to keep changing what you are giving and taking. Again, some platforms are good at this and others are not.
Some platforms lock you in to their worldview, others allow you total freedom. There is a tradeoff either way - making things easy to change often leads to a templated or fairly obvious end product shared by a lot of people. On the other hand, allowing anything to happen is both difficult for people to handle and can also lead to chaos. MySpace has elements of both of the above.
The point here is that we all want to be different, but not too different. We need to fit in with our chosen clique or class or club, but without losing our identity.
A widgetised web allows this to happen. With a widgetised web, everything you might want ot use comes to you as some form of widget for you to take, adapt and use. You effectively end up assembling your own online life from as many or as few widgets as you choose - so everybodies representation is different.
I coined a slogan to exemplify this - 'Don't put your stuff in your blog, put your blog in your stuff'. My hope is that very soon someone will build (if they haven't already) a blog composed entirely out of widgets. Or a wiki. Or a forum. Or all of them. Someone else will create a hosting platform that is designed to make it very easy to host widgets. Put these two together and we have a platform where everyone can choose their host and fill it with whatever widgets they want. There will be no pre-ordained 'central' application that you have signed up to and which sets the rules. Your blogging application will be as much a few widgets as your advertising network or your music videos or your IM widget.
So, although it is early days, you can already see the power of widgets and the route we are taking with them. Everybody I talk to now has a widget for their project. Because widgets are a means of distribution, a way to allow your application to be shared, a method of ensuring that your project can be used.
In a world where everyone uses MySpace, MySpace set the rules. If they decide (as they did this week) that they will make it harder for Flash widgets to refer to external sites, they don't have to ask permission to do this, they can just do it. It affects all their users and all other widget producers. It is a very old fashioned way of doing business (and dare I say it, a very Rupert Murdoch way of doing business). If MySpace was just another widget that you had in your choice of host site, around which you had wrapped as many other funky widgets as you wanted - then you would have all the functionality of MySpace without being a slave to their need to control the environment.
I predict it will only be a matter of months before hugely successful applications are launched entirely as widgets. You will sign up for an account as now, but you will have to find your own host for the widget. These new widgetised applications will spread like wildfire, but they will be unlike anything we have seen before as they spread throughout the inernet and mutate by coming in contact with millions of other widgets.
The widgetised future is just beginning.
Comments