WidgetsLive!

Here we are at WidgetsLive! in San Francisco. The morning sesions are drawing to a close. Arlo Rose the founder of Konfabulator, now Yahoo! Widgets, talked about how they came to be. Dan Strauss was scarily professional and comprehensive in launching their product. More on this anon. The platform is for creating widgets for both the desktop and the web simultaneously. You can use their SDK to make widgets that will auto install in MySpace, which opens up huge potential - but the question of monetization and control is left hanging.
After that the morning got a bit technical with a session on building widgets with Flex followed by a session called Building widgets using HTML and JavaScript. This session was done by Alex Russell from sitepen. Alex was great, with a focus on effective widgets v. shiny widgets. He put it as: Shiny (not equal to) utility, Lickability! = Utility. Exactly the Snipperoo message. Quote of the morning, 'Widgets are a window into the emergent web of data'. He also pointed out that adverts are not generally seen as widgets, though they fit the definition. Heh, we have always thought of ad network code as widgets.
Meme of the day is how no-one called what they did widgets until everyone else started using the term widget - then they decided they had to. Same with us - why do you think we're called Sniperoo - because we called them snippets.