When Business Week talked about "The Next Small Thing," it gave tons of examples of different ways to use widgets. Some of them facilitate the community aspects of the web and social networking sites. Take the Flixster movie widget that is popular with many Facebook users. Users can list the movies they've seen, and give a rating and a review; they can also look at pages that show movie reviews and ratings from their friends. They can even check out what's currently playing in the movies and film trailers.
iLike saw amazing success with its Facebook widget. It lets people share their favorite musicians and songs, and informs users' friends when they're going to a concert. It's not unusual for users to see this information and buy tickets to the same concert. Though iLike signed up a million users in the first six months of its existence through its web site, it signed up its second million in one week on Facebook. It now has four million users -- and is selling ads and earning commissions.
Widgets can work as a sort of "lubricant" to help people socialize on and offline, and to help them express themselves; after all, there are lots of ways to use data. Dave Morgan, writing for Media Post Publications, thinks it can go a lot further though. He notes how blogging brought about the rise of the citizen journalist, and thinks that widgets might bring about the rise of the citizen publisher. With widgets, he explains, "people can import much more content and functionality into their web pages...They are assembling more complete consumer media solutions. They are becoming not just writers, but citizen publishers...they can even receive payments from movie studios for putting movie trailers on their pages."
Morgan further notes that they can redistribute these widgets to other citizen publishers. In this way, the publisher becomes a syndicator. This can lead to citizen networks -- users setting up "their own groups of sites, publishers, journalists, and users that they connect with constantly, distributing and redistributing items among themselves." This could certainly upset the status quo, but wise content producers, advertisers, site owners, and SEOs should look upon this as an opportunity.
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