Widgify

Hooman from Clearspring but at Widgify has gone all philisophical on atomisation. Having just come back from talking on 'Blowing up the Web' (into its atomic or constituent parts, on the basis that they would then reform into the combinations that the users wanted) at LIFT in Geneva, I'm on the same wavelength:

As the web continues to become disaggregated, there will be a burgeoning demand for tools that can help users effectively leverage these “information atoms,” together in a meaningful manner. Not only will there be a need for tools that help users aggregate widgets, but also tools that enable widgets to work together. Imagine a world where there are as many widgets as there are web pages. Won’t it suck royally if they don’t work together?

Tools like Netvibes, Pageflakes, and Uber represent the next generation of content aggregation platforms.  Marc Canter has dubbed these tools as Digital Lifestyle Aggregators, or DLAs. DLAs will enable users to manage their content and services across platforms (desktop, web, mobile) and even across social networks.

Digital Lifestyle Aggregators will certainly form part of the hosting landscape - though I think it's certain that their form and function will change radically in short order. The current DLAs are little more than closed silos which all promote a single worldview and all control rather than promote the use of widgified content. There's little reason why the widgets themselves aren't the dominant method of managing content, i.e. widgets, in the next generation DLAs. A framework into which to throw widgets will be all we need - the intelligence will be of our choosing and will be embedded by means of widgets. And what a widgetsphere that will be. Hooman posits widgets that can talk to eachother. For sure - widgets that are created from APIs and Pipes and scrapers and applications will talk to eachother. This is the widgetsphere that we're currently building between ourselves.

Comments

[Hooman Radfar]

Hey Ivan. I think you are dead on. I actually included your company in a comment below the post when folks asked why I did not have a fuller list of potential people in the DLA/widget management space. It is going to be a bit of a mess for a while, but that is why it is fun!