Web widgets were big in 2007, but in 2008 they’re going to turn into a supernova. With interest from billion-dollar companies and the whole internet buzzing about the power of this emerging software medium, we take an in-depth look at what they represent, why people are using them and why people are getting so darn excited about how it could shape our online and o ine frontiers.

So what exactly is a widget then? Well, contrary to the common belief, they aren’t exclusively linked to the web and in fact, any online connectivity is largely irrelevant to the definition unless explicitly referring to a component of that type. The common perception is of a miniature, self-contained program or application that tends to have limited or specific use. Widgets therefore rely on being used in the plural sense to cater for all manner of different user scenarios, and are typically there to complement larger, more sophisticated environments. For instance, the built-in accessory programs that shipped in previous operating systems such as Windows 95 and XP could be viewed as the precursors to the Vista Gadgets, much like the case with Mac OS X Dashboard Widgets. Here, basic utilities are being elevated to graphical components that can be collected together and viewed across the desktop, based on the user’s own preference. Easy to customise, instantly at hand. Perhaps the most vital factor, however, is that producing and sharing these types of widgets has been opened up to enable ordinary users the chance to develop niche solutions that do everything from tune your guitar, tell you the weather, convert currency or just watch pandas in captivity. This has since migrated to the web space, where early widget-like technology in the form of JavaBeans and Applets has been simplified down to embrace the regular building blocks we take for granted, such as HTML and CSS. These new web widgets draw on Web 2.0 constructs such as RSS and blogging to splice up and drag in data from other online sources. In very simple terms, the widget delivers a simplified chunk of an existing website outside of its primary domain. Quickly this appeal has been leaped on by the big social networking or portal sites, who are cultivating a community platform that they want users to visit and reside within– with widgets extending that experience. They also have a playful interactive nature that encourages curiosity, which then leads to further page clicks. They can be added to websites and to the profiles of community site members, which means that they thrive on popularity. This sort of simple mass-marketing has made the web widget an indispensable part of the web and made it big, big business.

Facebook is a brilliant example of how the widget exploded in 2007. Facebook is a social networking site that has gained phenomenal popularity because it operates in a way that keeps communities private, while allowing for enormous growth by allowing users to add their friends. There are 43 million Facebook users who, it can be argued, can all be linked to one another by association or community. These close networks of friends are heavily in uenced by what happens to peers on the site. When a new widget, sometimes called an application, is used by Facebook members, they are encouraged to send the application to their friends. This domino e ect means that developers have a vast network to show their work to and potentially earn money from. The direct nature of Facebook means that even if a person does not invite their friends to add an application or widget, the action of them doing so is still visible to their peers. Quite often you will see on the Notifications page that a friend has added the Superpoke application, for instance.

Why, then, would web developers seek to make applications in what some would see as a closed network, and one that strangles creativity in accordance to the rules that govern the website, rather than creating much more free widgets that can be used on the wider web? The first and most fundamental reason has to be about reaching large audiences. With so many people online and all of them using different search engines and websites, it’s hard to know where to pitch a widget. Facebook gives its members updates on the new features their friends are trying out, which allows applications to spread much more quickly and cheaply than if they were available on standalone websites that have limited traffic. If you want to immediately gauge the credibility or usefulness of a widget, you could quite easily use Facebook to provide you with a pretty decent benchmark.

In terms of development, Facebook is doing all it can to encourage potential widget-makers. The company’s founder, Mark E. Zuckerberg, has recently announced a new investment fund, the FB Fund, to give grants of up to $250,000 to developers creating new tools for the site. If you are fresh from university, the lure of a grant to help you on your way to becoming a decent developer or starting your own business on a website you probably use every day can be most alluring. Facebook aren’t the only ones who are jumping on the widget bandwagon. Google have developed what they call Google Gadget Ventures. Widget businesses are eligible for $100,000 in capital, provided they allow Google to have an equity stake in the company. Of course, there are some rules and conditions regarding the uptake of money as there are with the Facebook deal, but there’s no doubt that the attraction is there for web developers to get a leg up with these billiondollar companies before branching out on their own.

If you are a budding web developer, you will have heard countless stories of individuals who have become millionaires practically overnight. One of the most famous cases is that of Joe Aigboboh and Jesse Tevelow who wrote the Sticky Notes widget for Facebook. It has been added more than three and a half million times and generates $45,000 dollars for them each month, not to mention interest from other massive companies. This sort of quick turnaround is enough to get anyone with even the slightest knowledge of web development involved in attempting to make their fortune. So it’s clear then that there is money out there to be made from widgets, and that if you have the right idea at the right time, you can set yourself up for life. So once you’ve come up with your great idea for a widget, how do you go about getting out there? Most of the big companies will provide you with a toolkit that you can use to provide for their sites. This does, however, mean that you are restricted by the rules of that code or that site. If you want to develop a more generic widget that can be available to the whole web, there are lots of options. And arguably, the biggest site for this out there is Widgetbox.

Widgetbox is a web-widget marketplace that serves both the developers who create widgets and the web publishers who use widgets on their sites. One of its big draws for developers is that it can take applications that have already been created and ‘widgetise’ them, even taking care of the specifics needed for particular websites like Facebook or MySpace. The other advantage is that because it acts as a marketplace, web publishers can view any widgets you submit to the site. This gives developers the chance to have their widgets taken up by big companies. It’s clear then that the widget is here to stay; its success has attracted not just interest from website owners and developers, but they are big business for marketing companies who can use the widget to convey product information to the masses. The scale of their profitability is evident in the creation of the Widgety Goodness conference, where developers, site owners and marketing companies can get together to share ideas, promote products and generally love all things widget.

The conference is hosted by Ivan Pope who is the founder of Snipperoo, widget blogger and an internet visionary. He has a clear idea why web developers are turning to widgets. "It adds a further scaleable skill set to their repertoire. There are a whole bunch of issues around widget development, from standard JavaScript, Flash and DHTML-type development through to choice of platforms and distribution and tracking tools. In some ways, widget development is akin to website development – a lot of the same issues are present." The scalability of widgets and their meteoric rise has attracted a lot of media attention. We asked Pope if he thought this had a detrimental effect on those developing normal web applications. "Well, the media has a short attention span and they are certainly interested in widgety and platform stuff. In some ways, widgets are an entry point to a lot of social networks that have been closed to developers up to now. It gives publishers and clients a way to access spaces that they didn’t have before. I have been preaching that all content should be widgetised and that centralised websites are on the way out."

That wish or prophecy might not be as far-fetched as you’d be forgiven for thinking. If a certain Californian software development giant gets its way, we might be viewing online content much more seamlessly to the point where it lives through your desktop. Up until now, many of the widgets associated with sites or portals have existed within their own architecture – usually embedded within a page or at least a bespoke browser. For instance, to use and utilise a Facebook widget, you’d have to be visiting Facebook, be logged in and have chosen to add a certain application to your profile page. It’s all a bit, well, traditional. With AIR, developers of rich internet applications can now migrate those services out of the browsers and onto the desktop of pretty much anything – mobile devices included. What this facilitates is the ability to access system resources that wouldn’t be possible within the browser sandbox, such as extended file access and ultimately those places where more sensitive user data is stored. One of the much publicised examples of a real-world progressive AIR application is the eBay Desktop or ‘San Dimas’ produced by EffectiveUI and Adobe to showcase the power of the new tool. Here the user is presented with a bespoke eBay-themed interface that can be totally customised to fit a personal workfow, which in itself would not be possible within the confines of the original site for various reasons. Extra functionality is added to provide auction search or listing tools that are operable on or offline, with web-based eBay records cached to the local system when a connection is established. When Web Designer first encountered this project during our US visit earlier this year, we came away with the thought that far from abandoning the browser, Adobe were encouraging site firms to create their own branded clients. Whether that seems feasible and desirable on a larger scale remains to be seen, but you can also see the crossover into the widget world in the way that these lightweight applications are distributed and even built. By leveraging existing and familiar web building blocks in the form of HTML, JavaScript and Flash, developers don’t need to go beyond their existing skill sets to forge powerful standalone experiences – something we’ve already observed with the widgets or gadgets found on both Mac OS X and Windows Vista.

"Extending the web applications we’re developing to run directly on the desktop and across platforms, without extra coding or the need to learn new, complex OS-centric development technologies, opens up new business opportunities," conforms Michael Lebowitz, co-founder and CEO, Big Spaceship. "We can use our current skill set to solve some of the traditional problems that plague web applications, such as losing data when a page refreshes, and help our clients take the next step in connecting with their customers."

This developer accessibility and transparency is a really important golden rule to the propagation of a widget culture. The enthusiasm to mashup Web 2.0 content that we’re also seeing across the internet has helped to develop that on-the-fly approach to generating applications. What’s nice is that we’re almost harking back to the DIY approach that hobbyist coders had during computing in its infancy, and acknowledging that enthusiasm has led to frameworks and APIs opening out.

It wouldn’t be a massive leap to think that all web content could be widgetised, and with the huge successes continuing with large firms like Facebook, Google and Yahoo!, there seems to be no end to the money that will be plowed into this industry.

The real value, however, will be in the freedom it gives developers to distribute their efforts outside of the traditional channels we were once used to. Because the big dotcom brands are driving the phenomenon, we’re almost seeing a more high-profile variant of the shareware or freeware community coming into fruition, and perhaps allowing bedroom coders to make a name for themselves. This is where the innovation of those things we take for granted will occur and hopefully push the boundaries for the better. There’s no doubt that widgets are here to stay and that we will undoubtedly be seeing more and more from them, but what will this mean for predicting the wider web picture? Pope reckons, "In five years time, I think we will have a totally different landscape – the move to social networks, user-generated content, etc, the fact that users like to construct their own view of the internet and not take anything as given. We should see all content fragmented and brought back together again. This adventure has only just begun."