Why Widgets Matter - Widget History and Growth
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The concept necessary to the development of widgets first hit the radar in the 1990s with PointCast, a startup that tried to promote a service which "pushed" data from the web to desktops without the use of a web browser. As is usual with these things, some thought push technology was the next big thing, while others ridiculed it or scratched their heads, not understanding why someone would want to have data shoved down his or her throat.
The relatively limited technology available at the time made things worse. With all that data being pushed through them, networks slowed down. Companies saw their networks go through data bottlenecks when their users took advantage of PointCast's service, and some of them forbade its use. Many home users had problems with the bandwidth -- remember, the majority of web surfers were still on dial-up connections.
But all that began to change in 2000. WeatherBug, a very small push program that sits on the user's desktop and does one simple thing -- tell the weather -- came out. In its first eight months, more than 1.5 million users downloaded it. Today, more than 65 million people have registered for the WeatherBug service.
One major sign that it was time to start paying attention to widgets came a couple of years ago, when Yahoo bought Konfabulator for an undisclosed sum. The two-year-old company made widgets for the Macintosh. Yahoo took the bold (and prescient) step of giving away the Konfabulator software that allows users to make widgets. The venerable search engine now has a site at which users can download "1,000s of widgets for your Mac or Windows desktop."
Yahoo is not alone in its interest in widgets. MySpace recently purchased photo-sharing service Photobucket for $300 million. MySpace may well have figured "if you can't beat them, join them" with this purchase; the two companies had a spat before the purchase over Photobucket's service putting ads within its photos and videos -- photos and videos that MySpace users were embedding in their own pages. But MySpace's owner, Fox Interactive Media, also purchased Flextor, a company that makes a mini-application which lets users mash up various media (such as videos) and embed them as widgets.
MySpace competitor Facebook really opened things up when it launched the Facebook Platform in May of 2007. Advertisers and developers could now create all sorts of widgets for Facebook that could be easily shared. Widget makers would be allowed to keep all revenues from sales and ads generated by their applications. The floodgates opened; less than a month later, more than 300 widgets could boast more than 1,000 users each.
Naturally Google is getting involved. Its initiative, dubbed Google Gadgets, focuses on widgets for the desktop. When it rebranded its personalized home pages as iGoogle, it also came up with a way for users to create simple gadgets with wizards. To encourage gadget creation among developers, it launched Google Gadget Ventures, a program that distributes grants and seed investments to developers and users of the Google Gadget API. The program awards $5,000 to developers who create promising gadgets that meet a certain number of weekly page views. A Google grand recipient wanting to develop a business around the Google gadget platform may receive $100,000 in seed money if he or she qualifies.
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