International Law

Widget watch

Clint Boulton at Google Watch says the world is warming to widgets:

This just in: Google doesn't lead every market it's in. No, it's true. According to the latest November 2007 widget stats from comScore, Google has the sixth widest widget-viewing audience with more than 19 million viewers.

MySpace.com widgets had the widest audience, reaching more than 57 million Internet users. Slide.com, which just banked $50 million in investment funds, ranked second with 39.2 million viewers. Nearly 148 million U.S. Internet users viewed widgets, confirming that the public is wild about widgets.

What is a widget? Widgets are lightweight applications that can be embedded or downloaded onto another site and can update content on the fly or be interactive. Widgets have been created for news feeds, weather reports and rolling stock quotes. They can also be interactive games requiring multiple players.

Google calls its widgets Gadgets, while Facebook, which facilitated the widget craze when it opened up its platform to third-party developers last May, calls its widgets applications.

Because Facebook apps require users to interact with the applications (other widgets, such as Gadgets, are measured in terms of views or exposures) Facebook now gets its own reporting metrics at comScore.

Facebook apps are also doing quite well; more than 20 million Facebook visitors, most of whom were between the ages of 18 and 24, engaged with an application in November.

Slide, which owes its latest investment round in part to its immense popularity on Facebook, saw three of its apps notch in Facebook's top 10 apps. Slides' Top Friends application was the leading Facebook application for the month, with more than 6.2 million engaged viewers. Slide's Superpoke! and FunWall garnered 3.6 million and 2.1 million users, respectively.

All of this is well and good, but what does it really mean for the market? After all, most of these are silly games that promote little more than entertainment. Well, yeah, but users of social sites that offer widgets are going to stay on longer.

Widgets promote stickiness, and should Facebook, Google, MySpace and the others continue to create innovative widget ads that interact with people in a non-intrusive way, widgets will became major revenue mechanisms. At the least, they provide another weapon in these vendors' arsenals as they fight for ad dollars.

That's in the near term. Longer term, I expect widgets, like the broader social network technologies, to bleed over into the enterprise. I believe you'll increasingly see widgets pop up in enterprise social networks.

Read more here.

Full post as published by Freedom to Differ on January 26, 2008 (boomark / email).