It’s not only widgets, the entire mashup phenomenon that isn’t really working. I’m not usually such a naysayer, but for the sake of fellow developers I think perhaps I could call this one out. When I say widgets, I’m referring to widgets and mashups, both on the web and the desktop. I am also including Facebook applications (really, they fall under the widget category). So why do widgets suck so much?
The first and often noted problem is that most are sheer novelty. Knowing who has read my weblog today or what the weather is next Tuesday is just sort of fun to know. Seeing a map of where in the world people are Twittering is something I only glanced at once. It’s difficult to maintain attention and grow your audience if they don’t really care to see your application every day.
From a business perspective, widgets are leeches. You are completely dependent on another service for your business. Your software is at their mercy. How is that different from being dependent on an operating system or on the web? For one, the Internet isn’t controlled by any single corporation. Developers love this because although there are certainly standards and limitations, these probably aren’t going to abruptly change so someone can make more money. Secondly, developers really have been wary for a long time about cross-operating system compatibility, but we also trust that operating systems developers care about maintaining applications that run on that operating system. It’s more of a symbiotic relationship.
Website developers, however, do care that people are making widgets for their site. It’s a different type of caring though. Website marketers see having an open API for their site as gaining unpaid labor. “Shh… don’t tell the developers that they’re just promoting our site for free.” The widget/mashup will never be as popular as the service it’s promoting and the service developers are all too happy to spend some time creating an API for the amount of publicity it will generate. The actual development of widgets/mashups only increases this publicity for them.
Speaking of unpaid labor, how are any of these widgets making their developers money? Licenses? Subscriptions? Ad revenue? Paid services? By building off another company’s platform, your company lacks complete control of revenue.
Widgets can be used as a promotional tool to draw attention and users to your software, but I’m wary of trying to make an entire business dependant on another, more compelling piece of software. I’d much rather be developing that compelling service. I can only see two cases where developing a widget/mashup could be a good thing for a developer. One, you are using it to promote a larger application and it’s not your only means of promotion. Two, you’re a student, in need of a portfolio item, or learning a new language. Widgets/mashups really shouldn’t be whole businesses and developers shouldn’t see a widget as their opus.
Then again, perhaps I just don’t get it. Maybe some developers really only have widget-sized ambitions. Maybe I’m just not one of them.
56 Comments
Sam Purtill
I agree with what you are saying, especially about the business model driving these widgets.
However, there has got to be some sort of model that exists. Slide.com gets over 200M uniques/month (I have a friend that works in marketing) and they are talking about building a billion dollar company off of widgets. It really makes no sense to me. But Max Levchin is about 20x as smart as me, so he probably sees a way to monetize it in the future.
Uh oh, sounds like the dot-com days all over again — eyeballs > revenue
:/
Website Developers
You never know today’s novelty could become tomorrow’s necessity. Did anyone dream that Ipod would become so popular ?
r
pretty much agree with you, plus i hate how long it takes some sites to load when one widget slooooooooowwwwwsss down the loads. anyways, this whole widget craze is just like the portalization of the web (remember when the big thing was creating these huge portal pages with all sorts of useless boxes of information?), except you can do it… well, anywhere you want (blah).
i wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the business potential of widgets - anytime you can get eyeballs with targeted content, you can make money. adbrite recently released an “advertise within an embedded image” feature, which is pretty useless on its own, but gives an idea of what could be done.
i can see youtube easily embedding ads into embedded flash videos and making a killing … and that’s a widget too!
Michael Terry
“Maybe some developers really only have widget-sized ambitions.”
Lol.
Agree in general, although, aren’t there mashups around that get *some* consistent traffic? Like sex-offender Google maps or something? If they get 1000 uniques a day, throw some adsense on there, and make two or three hundred dollars a month, that’s Ok. Then they do it again with another little idea; soon they’ve got a comfortable, passive income.
Jason
I just read a similar article on http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog today. I don’t know if any of you would find it interesting.
Just thought I’d mention it. I’m not affiliated with him in any way. I just like reading his blog!!
Brandon Watts
In our case, the AutoRoll widget that we’ve developed has drawn major attention to our recommendation engine and associated solutions from the blogosphere in ways that we couldn’t even begin to imagine otherwise.
The recommendation engine is at the core of the experience, and AutoRoll highlights its power and flexibility. Therefore, the widget isn’t our only product, but it’s enabled us to build an engaged community around what we’re doing, which is truly invaluable.
Brandon Watts
Criteo Evangelist
Widgiality
lol I think you’re mixing up two things - I mean I’ve never considered mashups the same as widgets. Widgets usually involve javascript or flash and some small backend php script. Whereas mashups can be an entirely new service and application, while widgets are just small gadgets that heavily depend on the main service. Mashups can sometimes thrive on their own, and may use just a bit of inital information from a.p.i.s
Alex Shenoy
I tend to agree with the argument made here. I like the idea of widgets and open APIs because it encourages development and allows convergence. But I also like when everything just fits where its supposed to go. A kind of puzzle effect. Where this application fits on my desktop here and does something useful for me without looking out of place. My big beef with widgets is that there are so many bad ones, that the good ones get lost in the crowd. I have the same problem with finding decent themes.
There are a few functions that widgets could solve for me, but I get tired of trying to find the one that fits in that last spot of the puzzle for me. And that is another problem. Using Karamba on KDE, I noticed that so many widgets look like garbage on my nice clean-themed desktop. Or I find a whole set of widgets and this one that I like doesn’t fit the look and feel of the others. This kind of parallax effect or missing puzzle piece makes my day harder.
I would add that open APIs for some services are good because they allow you to integrate that service into a full fledged application. Which is nice. An example is last.fm+any_music_player_ever_made. And this kind of thing allows really nice open development, and helps facilitate convergence, where applicable.
André
I concur whole-heartedly. I’ve never understood the widget/mashup phenomenon.
mightyarmenian
….youve been dugg
PowerLlama
I didn’t realize people were trying to turn a profit and make a business out of mashups and widgets. For the most part, I’ve never heard of anyone trying this. To me it seems that sites are providing API’s to generate traffic and hype like you said, but also to allow users to create things the original developer never thought of.
I guess I’m trying to say I’m not too certain what you’re getting at. They’re novelties, like you said, but I don’t see anyone charging for the use of these novelties, or trying to make money off of them.
dfgdgf
@ website developers
“You never know today’s novelty could become tomorrow’s necessity. Did anyone dream that Ipod would become so popular ?”
when did the iPod become a necessity….?
person
Yeah,
Cause if it don’t pay, it’s not worth doing. God forbid programming emulate anything such as “art” where you only do it because you have a desire to do it.
Maybe if you live in Southern California, but everywhere else in the world a widget that reminds you it’s going to rain tomorrow is extremely useful. And double clicking on taskbar’s time is a stupid means of getting the date. CPU Monitoring and many other Widgets are extremely helpful, especially when readily available.
On the other hand, networking and socializing widgets are nonsense and can take one in the dumper.
Jay
Also, they eat RAM like its a large, beautiful, particularly delicious cake or sandwich. People I wish I didn’t know are always saying things like “Gosh! Why is my super expensive Macbook Pro so slow launching Safari to look at myspace and iPhoto to look at pictures of our sorority party last weekend !?!?” (translated from retarded, illegible scrawlings consisting mainly of “omg” “lol” and “jeeeez u guyz ru com1 2 th br zomg drunksogdrunksadfaaghahahahahah!”)
and then they have 36 widgets running.
idiots. i hate widgets. except weather.
Jonathan Haddad
I agree and disagree here. On one hand, there are a lot of really crappy, completely useless widgets. Most of the time they are simply there to promote a website and offer little to no useful functionality.
However, sometimes the widget or api call makes available something we can’t do on our own. A good example of this is google maps. We just don’t have all the map data available that Google does.
The widget model over the next few years will most likely change as businesses realize what’s profitable and what’s a waste of time. Since the model is fairly new, it’ll go through a few iterations before it matures and we see the garbage drop off.
SadFace
I agree so much.
Facebook sucks with all these widgets / miniprograms.
I spend so much time trying to install the right app just to interact with my friends’ pages.
Plus they’re not that well incorporated. Every website wants to be the “everything site”. Which is why yahoo kinda sucked back in the day. C’est la vie, and hope for the best.
PENIX
Agreed, widgets are just silly toys, but maybe someday someone will find a way to make one useful.
Mardo
How can you argue that aggregating data of multiple services to a single view and integrating that data across the data and views could not be valuable?
I think maybe you should go back to using paint show pro and un-plug your internet connection. That way you dont have to depend on anything but you and your selfish ideas.
Adios!
Dan
I would never had read this or heard of your blog if it wasn’t for the digg widget. Most widgets are horrible but there are a few nice ones. Widgets are still so new and I wouldn’t be too quick to judge them. but, what the hell do I know?
Daniel
Can I just throw it out there that it’s possible that not everyone who makes a widget or Facebook application is necessarily stupid for not having a solid fucking business model?
Perhaps some people derive satisfaction from creating something that is useful to others. Perhaps some enjoy the challenge of creating it. Developers can’t allow for every feature people could possibly want - it’s impractical, and furthermore it would make their service less user-friendly. Allowing widgets and whatnot creates the capability for extra functionality without subverting the simplicity of the main product.
dstryr
“when did the iPod become a necessity….?”
its necessary enough to sustain a profitable business. The kind of business that this article presumes won’t be profitable.
Sean Mulholland
You forget that widgets are also about personalization and customization. Think of them as stickers for your lunchbox. While the art nerds cover their boxes in personal works of art (in our case, tech nerds customizing websites) the vast majority of people couldn’t do much more than a stick figure. With widgets *anyone* can build a fully featured page quite easily.
For the Facebook set this is really fun. Last.fm widgets to share your musical tastes, Flickr widgets sharing your latest photos, an embedded Meebo Room for on-page chat, etc. Only a few years ago this would have been impossible without significant programming skills. Now it’s cut and paste.
Basically the bar to entry is dropping. People are making the web easier to use for the layman…much easier. You shouldn’t have to be an experienced mechanic to drive a car, just as you should have to be a codehead to have a decent website.
Granted we’re in the early stages so things are still pretty kitschy, what with the weather apps and whatnot, but it will evolve. Revenue models will develop. Licensing will work itself out. Remember, new and different isn’t always wrong.
Eric
I think you raise some valid points… but I don’t think the whole concept is invalid.
Case in point: Google’s AdSense is technically a widget.
Also, a number of mashups are genuinely useful in their own right. Housingmaps, for example. And there are certainly plenty of other sites that make good use of the Google Maps API.
Personally, I’ve never heard of anyone trying to build a business on the back of widgets… the vast majority of them do seem to be promotional. For example, if I put a widget for Last.fm on my blog (or Facebook profile, or Netvibes page), it’s effectively an advertisement for Last.fm.
And as a user of Last.fm, it’s a value added service - I’m more likely to use a service that offers widgets than one that doesn’t.
michael
I agree. I disagree. 99% of all that widget stuff is useless. No purpose. No meaning. BUT - its the 1% that will make the whole experience worthwhile and shape things to come.
Philipp Lenssen
I added widgets to a gaming site of mine (gamesforthebrain.com) as an extra feature, just because I was curious how it would work out. I’m also no fan of stuffing a blog with too many gadgets because it makes the site behave sluggish with little to no benefits. The 90s had their ticker stuff on top, I never liked those either…
wobudong
Widgets are simply a pain in the ass. But they never bother me. I always trash them.
martin
your blog is indeed stupid
Don Synstelien
I made you a widget. Can we still be friends
http://www.springwidgets.com/widgets/view/4567
-Don
springwidgets
MapWii
We run http://MapWii.com - a Google Maps MASHUP with a WIDGET. We have 17000+ people and respectfully disagree with your generalization.
Fresh
What would be a good example of a widget then? Stepping away from business value and monetizing, what is something that would be useful? Practical? Beneficial?
Walt Disney used to say “I would rather entertain and hope that people learned something than educate people and hope they were entertained.” In the sense of attracting a potential customer, wouldn’t this still apply? Certainly there must be brand development benefits, and somewhere in there a useful utility or practical application, no?
Fresh
@person: “And double clicking on taskbar’s time is a stupid means of getting the date.”
try hovering over it. now your life is easy.
PJ Davis
I think you’re confusing usefulness with being able to build a sustainable business around an idea. There are many mashups that i find useful on a regular basis, especially the one I created for in-house tech use at the ISP I work for, which takes the address from the customer database we have and overlays it on a google map. So now techs can just browse to the app on their treo, and instantly get a map of where they’re headed.
All widgets are not useful, I’ll give you that, but there are useful ones out there. Same with websites, or anything for that matter. There are stupid bands, stupid movies, stupid television stations, stupid everything. You can’t just paint a blanket over all items in a particular category, especially since you can only really point out one example. This is the computer world, and just like the real world, everything has it’s place.
Lee
I completely agree… we word mashup makes me cringe.
Web 2.0 reads - let’s repackage all the good stuff from Web 1.0, create a lot of crap to add to it so we end up back in Web 1.0 again in 10 years (probably less) because we’ve run out of ways dazzle and the industry and fortune companies so that they’ll part with their money!
It sucks… I’m not impressed
Thinking Rocks
“The first and often noted problem is that most are sheer novelty.”
And what, exactly, is wrong with novelty?
free wii
“The first and often noted problem is that most are sheer novelty. Knowing who has read my weblog today or what the weather is next Tuesday is just sort of fun to know”
That’s why its nice.
orb9220
I agree with person Says:
There are reasons for widgets and there are fluff widgets of no real pratical purpose.
In windows I use konfbulator now Yahoo widgets for my flickr account,Clock,weather and system stats for cpu ram hardrive space.
In Ubuntu I use one clock and weather and conky script giving me system vital info on cpu ram hd space and temps.
I like to know what is going on with my system. But that is me. Most are totally oblivious to there desktop because of Second Life,Wow,Myspace,IM’ing etc….
And they are the ones that usually end up with what I consider fluff widgets.
Oh! isn’t that cute there are Dogs,cats,Butterflies moving all over my Screen! Cool!”
Just as the debate on usefulness of Compiz/Beryl in linux world with a 3d rotating cube desktop. There is fluff features and actual productive features. And I see people dismissing it without even trying it out past the Wow! Flashy factor.
Rick
Some widgets rock, though.
* Bookmarks a female developer *
srini
dear heaven, please let all the square coders continue toiling on api’s and other such ninnery while i finish what i’m working on. please.
-s
Levi
Totally agree. Wigits are a waste of time to all parties involved.
anonymous coward
I think blogs suck. I was thinking about creating an anti-blog blog. I think blogs are on the same level as widgets; novelty.
brian
I found your “Widgets Suck” post in a widget on a site called SpringWidgets.com. In conclusion: Hooray for widgets!
JT
You are 100% right with this. This is short term stuff only. I some companies like one listed above can leech off the main service for a while, but you know when they get too popular or are too much of a drain on the system, they will be turned off faster than a lightswitch.
Free labour, free promotion. A sucker’s game for sure.
deter
widgets are over. its all about sprockets!
Peter
Control the widget and the service. Use the widget to provide your customer a better experience. Use the service to drive the widget and allow the customer to improve upon the experience himself.
William Khoe
If you want to put it that way, every website on the Internet is sort of a widget leeching of the web browser. Web browser is built by a company, and in case you don’t know, yes, they do make money (Firefox gets millions from search referrals)
Widgets have their purposes, I for one, would love to be able to implant one on my brain and be able to bring it up by thinking about it
Alex Bogak
Hi
I also think that widgets aren’t the panacea from all the things, but i find some good in them as well.
They let your imagination a great training.
more on my blog
nick
mashups & widgets aren’t necessarily about monetizing in the short or near term. they’re usually about building brand trust by giving users tools to access relevant information. they’re springboards to editorialized or otherwise centralized content… and that’s not very different from say, a changing billboard on the highway …except that it’s your billboard.
Erin Quick-Laughlin
Great post. And from the responses it looks like everyone’s honing in on the next iterative phase.
Our team has been working on these concepts for over two years now. It’s very exciting to see the pot starting to boil.
Under the current concept of widget and mashup, the widget is limited until it becomes a mashup. With the exception of the most basic widgets, we pretty much see a widget and mashup as the same thing (a mashup is just a widget made up of other widgets).
As you say in your post, today’s widgets are mostly “novelty” nick-nacks. The way we see it widgets shouldn’t have limits to their complexity - the perfect widget can always be improved by adding a new layer, or combining it with more powerful widgets.
We want the tools to create widgets and mashups to be delivered through the browser and be easy enough for anyone to use.
And that brings me to your biggest and most important point, which was about the developers not being rewarded for their efforts. Yes, developers need more control over licensing and monetizing their widget work. They should be able to get paid automatically, and if others mashup their stuff into bigger applications, the platform should handle distributing revenue through the levels. If developers want to setup an open-source license, creative-commons license, or a license that is pay-per-use / ad-supported / one-time fee, it’s up to them and their widget/mashup team, and the platform should also handle that.
Here’s another opine from my team-mate Ryan Gahl: http://www.someelement.com/2007/06/from-libraries-to-platforms.html
Widgets 1.0 do suck, but Widgets 2.0 are going to rock!
chris
You do not have a contact email on your site. Maybe reasons pertaining to the crazies on the net.
Just wanted to say I enjoyed reading your blog. I will be back to read more.
chris
Motorcycle Guy
I agree widgets are the stupidest idea ever and are often full of vulnerabilities.
SHRIKEE
I think the only reason widgets are popular because they look fancy, pretty much everyone can make them (api’s anyone?) and they work on most systems and websites… But that doesn’t make it a cool feature. I think in a few years, rather earlier than later, we will see a whole new form of miniapps evolve out of widgets.
I strongly oppose widgets currently purely because I with my somewhat limited design skills in code cannot stand the utter crap html or php or whatever they create once integrated. I wrote a few Wordpress plugins myself so I think I know a fair bit of php/html.
Also I have no need to see the weather on my desktop or pimp my low gasprices on my website. It’s all pretty much useless (there are exceptions, there always are!!).
I do however use this iGoogle page thing, but only for a rss feed and some comics like Dilbert and CAD… I think those are widgets too… While google calls them gadgets or something…
Todd
Leah, based on the comment you just left on the Venture Hacks blog…I think you need to get a grip. If anything, female programmers have an advantage in the industry because there are so few of them. Just because someone uses the word “man” in a sentence, doesn’t make them sexist.
After reading your blog, it sounds like you are just generally angry at the world. You might want to think about that, because a company would be crazy to hire someone with the attitude you portray.
You are a walking lawsuit.
popup creator
i think widgets are cool…and this is why they will be popular. never underestimate the herd mentality.
Leah Culver
Todd - Yeah, you’re right. I have been kind of negative lately. I definitely could be a little more positive on my blog. I really don’t think I’m that angry of a person.
Have you ever posted a comment and later thought you were being a bit too harsh? That’s what I did with the comment on Venture Hacks. I really like the blog and had been reading it for awhile and I don’t think the writers are sexist.
As a female developer I sort of feel like the little things add up. It’s like someone is poking you and finally you turn around and shout, “Stop it!” Then you feel bad for yelling. I’m not going to say being a female developer is easier or harder though because it’s awfully tough to measure.
Andy Earnshaw
You’re probably a smart person, but I think you’ve just missed the whole point of widgets.
Before I start my rant, let me introduce myself as one of the main developers of eBay Sidebar Tool for Windows Sidebar. I have to say, a lot of widgets/gadgets out there annoy me. But the ones that utilise APIs actually have a point and there’s nothing sucky about them. Widgets were originally intended to be more accessible than desktop/web applications and they really live up to their purpose when they use an API.
With regards to the business model, we could have left our “gadget” at version 1 and we’d most likely not make much less on affiliate commissions. It’s the ambition to make a really useful tool that drives us to continue developing it over time. The affiliate commissions just enable us to do so. While facebook/blog/webservice widgets might not be useful to you, a female developer with more than widget-sized ambition, they *are* useful to a lot of people. I’d say our gadget is a pretty good example of this. eBay one of the biggest sites on the web. Millions of people use it religiously and for those people who have to log in, check all their items then come back and do the same thing all over again in 30 minutes. The fact that they can see all this at a glance is much more productive and from the number of people that rely on our widget I think I can safely say that they don’t think Widgets suck.
That all being said, we still make mostly affiliate based widgets and there’s a good reason for it: it pays the bills. Should there be a problem with that? I’ve built a few widgets myself that aren’t commission based, a couple of personalised feed readers, a dictionary searching gadget, and some others - and I actually like making them, knowing that they are actually of some use to some people. Whenever we decide to build a widget, we at least tend to try and be original about it, or squeeze in a lot of features that other widgets don’t include.
I think the main problem with widgets is, as you say, a lot of the developers don’t have enough ambition to take their ideas further and integrate clever features, or some are just stupid search boxes that open a website with an affiliate link and do nothing else. Some of our earlier widgets did that and to be honest, I’m not really proud of them so I don’t mention them as much
But if you have so much ambition, what are you complaining about? If you can see a bigger potential in widgets than most other developers, surely you could come up with something much more interesting than a blog post complaining about it? Maybe you just prefer to do everything the hard/long way around. I, for one, would love to know what your idea of a perfect widget would be.
Andy Earnshaw
I’d also like to add that just because you’re not in complete control of your revenue doesn’t mean it’s a bad business plan. Think of franchises, or companies that contract out other companies (this is true of many web development companies). If you rely on being contracted out by a company more established than you, you can make a lot of money from it - but what are you going to do when they find someone else who does your job better than you at a lower cost? You buy into a franchise and you’re basically just using somebody elses name selling their products and on their terms. Some of the world’s biggest companies are franchise operations (mostly restaurants ;)). Of course, as you pointed out, there’s always a chance that things can change abruptly, so it’s a bad idea to put all of your eggs in one basket - but that could be said of any business. All big businesses make money out of smaller businesses - but that doesn’t mean the smaller businesses are dumb for doing it, because they can make a lot of money too.
I actually know of a developer who’s widgets pay for his constant round the world travel. He develops in his spare time and makes a steady stream of revenue from it. I seriously doubt that steady stream of income would stop abruptly, unless he was ejected from an affiliate program without warning - something which I doubt happens often.