Widget Dissected (anatomy of my pages)

A few trends lately have left me queasy with "dissection."

Forget corporate buyouts of the 80's.

A widget is supposed to be a piece of (something) 'independent, with liberty and justice for all.'

For example: weather.

How can you campare the weather.com magnet of 1999 with their Flash maps of today? Yet, one was a widget... Meaning, the first could be stuck on my (crappy) website. The other... couldn't, so why would I care?

Widgets are (increasingly) what's cool: extending your functionality to a guy you met in a bar named "Herb" who has a website...

Dude, I'm on 40,130 websites. I... (convert Farenheit to Celcius, but with a cool green goo thermometer.) My first 10 users lead to 10,000. Who CARES if you know my name? I'm an Ultimate Widget (UW).

As an UW, I don't even need a household URL.

When the guys at my credit union realized who I was, they put me (my widget) on their website. (Look ma - I'm a non-profit!) I jest.

Facebook has 2,500 W's, but my buds in Boulder are UW. (It's a status.)

If the Internet is "access to information," yet UW is "access to engaging functionality," then the Internet is evolving from "a library" toward "My Ace Hardware."

Maybe. You tell me:

...is the WWW (3rd W = web of pages) evolving to the

...WWW (3rd W = widget, where you stick the nutty thing on your homepage, personal page, or public page and it handles each user / friend of mine differently?)

 

As users, I think we're still swimming in the idea.

As publishers, I think we hardly grasp it. (Sure, we use Flickr or YouTube to enhance our blogs... but do we demand 'embedability' from epicurious.com?)

As web pioneers, do we create this for the fray, looking to be the middle men in the distribution of functionality (the way 'web builder tools' unabashadly make publishers out of all our 3rd cousins?).

 

Do each of the top 10 websites unabashedly turn each of us into arbiters of their functionality? Yes, you may have added “Google Search” to your website, or Technorati search to your blog. How about the next 90 of the most popular sites? Can you add a Mercury News feed to your page, or mobile identity?

 

Widgets are a re-think of the Web, emerging.

 

Stay tuned: my next widget will watch Your Guppies (live) in (Oregon) tanks, via live cam, and you can post it to your home page and give away the babies (as social bio widgets). Guppies, reinvented, for the new Internet.