Widget distribution model, new issues.

Web 1.0, it builds the network, it opens a new communication medium and Web pages are published. Most of the content is only one-way communication. [Published Content]
Web 2.0, the network is established, the web becomes public and the links are created. The network becomes social and users can now easily start to comment and publish themselves with blogs andCMS. [ User Generated Content]
Web (3.0), social networks proliferate, communities collaborate and share more fast and more fast than on old-styles forums. New gateway tools between all these social networks are necessary to develop the socialization. [OpenSocial, Networking, upcoming article ...]

Widgets become very interesting gateway solutions and services, their evolution and their relevant folksnomy in the web ecosystem illustrates the fact that these applications gives publishers a new distribution model to enlarge visibility and support organic indexation inSEO. Here’s the summary of widget distribution model in the 4 following phases:

1. Prototype step: the first generation of widgets/gadgets look like small pieces of very complex codes to be included in web pages. Integration often requires an adaptation of the code, different programming languages are to be know by users and nothing seems to reveal the universal situation from today’s widgets. This step is very compartmentalized to senior developers. Diffusion seems to be shorted by the gap of Moore issue…
2. Diffusion of the innovation started: widgets become unavoidable in the blogosphere and the tendency is to connect and share information sources. New kind of plugins and preformatted themes are available and allow dynamic linkage from blogs and websites through these “gadgets”. Widgets play a key role in the same way as RSS feeds and portals publication likeWordpress/TypePad in the new arena of web 2.0.
3. Democratisation: popularity of blogs creates new niche markets and thus appear free services and even more simplified tools for the creation of custom container-widgets for different types of content. We’re widgting the web, like a “widget widget web”. Commercial and institutional sites are establishing now all their own widgets to distribute information on a large scale and with free distribution charges. At the same time, mobile networks and the Internet converge, mobile devices increasingly integrating Web services (iPhone,BlackBerry, SmartPhone, PocketPC ,…) and widgets become real multiplatform applications to distribute information in all the circumstances.
4. Normalization of widgets and applications: a new spreading-crowdsourcing philosophy is born, platforms like Facebook are now real places for branding by using widget distribution. APIs catalogs like Facebook and MySace ones, OpenSocial standardisation and lots of other wikis will help everybody to connect everything. The widget market is now mature, and those tools seem to bridge the solution for the new organization to a “web 3.0″, which is a Internet as a medium for turnkey that the content is a product to win.

All theses issues show a sharp transformation of the concept widget and especially a commitment to outreach to public sphere. On assumption that social networks require a strong spread of their user/content, as the principle of the pyramid, where the most important networks would become only if their network is well supported. Linkage and visibility provided by these tools get relevant. In addition to the concept of widget marketing already published previously, widgets, or applications or gadgets depending to the websites…, should be considered as a new distribution model: information-distribution new medium, branding & communications, and of courseSEO and eMarketing (tracking and monitoring widgets).

To this end, the question of selecting which service becomes important. Different solutions are proposed: server-hosted/self-hosted, standard/personalized? The objectives of your campaign become a key variable and the control of information tracking widgets will be as important as your data Analytics site. WidgetAvenue in France for example proposes paying packaged solutions or hosted, which have the virtue of living you any margin you need in the design and spreading outputs. But, in the era of open-source, distributed API, and the rapid development of standard likeOpenSocial, online solutions (and free!) such as SpringWidget, Opera and other widget-makers get more competitive and reactive that offline developments. Moreover, the most popular services become a social-networking reference for visitors who already have opened a profile on them, take for example ShareThis or Feedburner that provide outsourcing of some of your distribution services with expertise in terms of monitoring. Adding new widgets with identical services leads the user to create additional and duplicate profiles at a time where the web begins to saturate in social interfaces (see the excellent article from Jean-Marie Le Ray ). So investing time and money in custom development is still a strategy relevant in the era of wiki-economy?

Finally, as well as blogs and user generated content became inevitable in eMarketing strategies from Web 2.0, widgetising content or services is also essential. But without making your pages or blog over-gadgetised as Time-Square on New Year’s eve, this question must be asked very seriously, the opportunity presented by the distribution model and floksnomy of widget is a double-edged sword, however the Internet Mobile unveils arguments more relevant.

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