World Wide Web of Widgets
The web has seen an explosion in the use of widgets over the past year or so. So let's explore what a widget is and its uses. Note that in this post, we're discussing Web-based widgets only, rather than desktop widgets such as those provided by Yahoo Widgets or Microsoft's Vista widgets.
Context & Ripple Effects
Read/WriteWeb's explainer lands in the middle of a dense week of widget coverage: TechCrunch had profiled the rise of widgets built as advertising units three days earlier, John Cook's Venture Blog had framed 2007 as the year of the widget via startup Mpire, and GigaOM ran the same story under a skeptical headline asking whether widget mania had run amok. An explainer post at this moment signals the format has crossed from developer curiosity into mainstream industry vocabulary.
The desktop-versus-web distinction the post draws matters commercially: Yahoo Widgets and Microsoft's Vista ship widgets that live inside the operating system, while web widgets embed anywhere with no install. Netvibes' Universal Widget API, announced in March, pushed the same logic further — one widget spec that runs on any platform — turning portability into the next competitive front.
First-order effects
- Advertisers and widget makers are converging on embeddable mini-apps as ad creative, meaning brand budgets now flow directly into distributed code rather than placements on publisher pages.
- Start-page and social-platform operators must decide whether to adopt open specs like Netvibes' UWA or keep widgets proprietary, since portability decides whose directory controls distribution.
Second-order effects
- Desktop widget vendors — Yahoo Widgets and Microsoft's Vista gadget set — face pressure from web widgets that need no OS install, pushing them toward browser-based versions of their own catalogs.
- As widgets scatter across millions of pages outside any single publisher's control, measurement becomes the contested layer: whoever tracks widget usage reliably gains leverage over both advertisers and developers.
Third-order effects
- If embeddable widgets become the default unit of third-party functionality on any web page, the web shifts from destination sites toward a mosaic of distributed modules, with cross-platform standards like UWA determining which aggregators capture the traffic and revenue.
- Pageview-centric analytics and ad models come under structural strain as engagement happens inside widgets hosted elsewhere — an opening for new measurement intermediaries if the pattern holds.
The trend: The web is reorganizing around distributable embeddable mini-applications, with widget platforms and standards bodies competing to own portability and measurement.