The Widget Wars (have begun)

I posted before about extendability of platforms via “embedability.” As I said there, widgets are a re-think of the web, emerging. I’d add that the lesson of the (miserable) FaceBook aps is that the Last.FM widget could (and maybe should) just replace the Last.FM website itself – who needs a URL when the point is to meet your audience where they are? (Admittedly, creating LastFM’s FB ap was a debate.) The funny thing is that all these companies created FB aps but still don’t get it – they’re not building iGoogle widgets, for example, which have been around for longer and can actually do useful things (not that being bitten by Zombies isn’t useful).

Embedability can be a business model, not just a marketing tool. Netvibes got it, but they need the rest of us to turn around and produce widgets. FaceBook got our attention, but anything you build for FaceBook is useless everywhere else. That’s stupid.

It’s not hard to imagine the Internet not as a network of linked & indexed “places” (websites), but rather, an ecosystem of consumer-product-ish widgets that snap into pages where we get what we need to done.

Check out Pagii. Can’t move your Netvibe widgets over to Pagii, can you? Hmm.

The next time someone says, “Hey, check out our new website,” I’d love to say, “Who cares – how’s your widget look on NetVibes or iGoogle?”