2007 Themes: Widgets, and the 9 Trends that are More Important
Wow, enough’s been written about widgets in the last week to fill a year’s worth of predictions. Fred is for them (subject to user happiness); Nick is apparently against them; and the New York Times just got around to discovering them.
Clearly they’re already the focus of some investor thinking and attention (Yahoo! corp dev folks are even talking about them publicly), and Newsweek has called 2007 the Year of the Widget, so it would be superfluous to call this a prediction from here. But I do think this ties into a broader trend that’s of interest, and that the market may resolve itself in unexpected ways.
This trend is about data visualization, presentation, syndication, and control. After all, publisher widgets are basically just websites - really small websites. And desktop widgets are client apps with small windows. (Though I don’t think client web apps are the future, given that there’s already a very effective client app called a “browser” on most pc’s today that do everything a widget client could do.)
What we’re seeing in the explosion of activity around widgets and embedded apps on MySpace is really the convergence of several trends that I think will all be (or continue to be) important this year: The portability of data streams, and the corresponding ability to aggregate them from around the web, apply rules to them, and ultimately control them at the consumer level. This broad trend leads to:
- New ways of visualizing data streams, especially as led by widgets right now. I’m also including “widgety” experienes like Netvibes here - but this is just a small part of a much bigger trend, as are Ambient devices and RSS-enabled rabbits. To build on the above comment about really small web pages, widget carriages are ultimately just like blog templates - rich presentation layers into which you pump your choice of content. People have lots of data available and will need lots of ways to view it.
- Social transparency and syndication. I can choose what content I expose in “publishery” applications, and I am almost automatically “publishery” in my social applications and digital self-expression because my friends can consume and subscribe to my stuff in reader-like ways. I have increasing ability to apply degree-based rules to this publication (let my friends but not my contacts see data, etc.).
- Data and content pushing upstream into communications. Aren’t IM windows and “you’ve got mail” pop-ups just desktop widgets? I can already subscribe to RSS alerts in IM and integrate messaging at the user & data level into my Yahoo! email in a way that provides a rich, seamless experience. I already consume my RSS feeds into my Outlook client (via Newsgator). There will be much more of this.
- On a related note, presence. That tv commercial where the guy’s watching a show on his laptop, big screen, and mobile window will happen for internet apps and presence-based communications first.
- Information control and data productivity. New apps and platforms are emerging to let users apply these trends to each other. Wesabe lets users do something interesting and valuable by combining a feed of their personal financial data and a social pool of user-generated content about merchants and transaction types, with a high level of security and control. Touchstone is about creating a high degree of control and intelligent automation over how communication and presence data are presented and consumed. These are platforms that allow user data mashups, and you don’t have to be a developer to leverage their power.
- I will probably post at greater length about the specific problem of productivity and Getting Things Done, but the kernel of the idea is, more and more of our communications are digital, more and more of our “to do’s” live in emails and IMs, and more and more important actions and decisions in our lives can be driven off of open-standards-based data and content (like digital wallets. . . or automatic mortgage re-fis). Managing personal and business productivity against all this data is thus more and more of a challenge - and a huge business opportunity. We’ll see how far Microsoft moves the ball forward with Vista - my bet is I still won’t be able to get my RSS, email, calendar, and to-do list to play perfectly with each other even in the same application, let alone across windows.
- That also touches on the issue of synchronization. Much has been said lately about web-based apps vs. client apps. It’s kind of a no-brainer to me that we need the power of the real-time web in all of our business applications now; lightning-fast access to our document data; access to our data via all our windows, even when we’re offline; automatic synching of docs modified offline; and always-safe, always-secure automatic backup of our precious data to the co-lo of our choice, be that an internet cloud or an expensive box in the basement. What’s so hard about that?
- Smart systems. By the way, I really don’t want to have to spend weekends at a time reorganizing my digital photo collection and figuring out 1,001 Lifehacker iTunes hacks.
- Oh, did I mention search? Hehehe.
