Widgets aren't as foundational to Web 2.0 as feeds and tags, but they're pretty important to grasp in order to take full advantage of the evolving web. In my opinion, these are the two most important things to realize about widgets:
1. If you can convince enough your supporters/fans to put your widget on their blogs, social networking pages, and web sites, you don't have to do any marketing! Your supporters will do your marketing for you - driving traffic to your web site, building your brand or cause, and conducting instant SEO for you. There's no better way to promote your web site.
2. In fact, if you've got a good widget, you don't even need a Website. You can offload all of your Web site's purpose/functionality to your Widget. This is a radical idea - and I think we'll be seeing a lot more of it in the coming years.
When I talk about widgets I mean:
A snippet of code that your supporters can place on their Websites, blogs, social networking sites, that allows a visitor to interact with your organization or web content.
What I don't mean:
There's a lot of confusion about this term because various organizations use it in so many different ways. Yahoo Widgets, for example, are not what I'm talking about above - Yahoo has built a desktop application framework on which you run an application that you build specifically for this framework. You can't, however, ask your supporters to put a Yahoo widget on their Websites, which limits the market for this type of "Widget" to only those people that have downloaded the Yahoo Widget framework. Yahoo Widgets are constrained by Yahoo's walled garden. Google has a similar framework that they call Gadgets. The key takeaway here is that you shouldn't ever hear the word "widget" and think you know what it means. Do some investigating.
But by all means - look for opportunities to start breaking apart your Website by asking supporters to host parts of it - or even by placing parts of it within frameworks like Google Gadgets or Yahoo Widgets. You stand to reach a much broader audience when you break apart your Website and offer it in discrete, useful chunks.
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