Widget Removal - Please Vote

Well my post on Widgets today generated some good comments. My favorite was the constant refrain that widgets are about self expression. Indeed.

But I also recognize that my blog has possibly gone a bit overboard.  So I am going to remove a bunch of widgets next week. You get to vote for which ones should stay.

Here are the ones that are going to stay, no matter how you vote:

1) In Heavy Rotation - Sonos sponsors this widget which generates money to charity. It stays.
2) Ads - They aren't technically widgets, but they generate money to charity. They stay.
3) Portfolio company widgets; Sitepal, Etsy, Indeed, and Delicious (for old times sake). My portfolio companies are how I make money. They stay.

Everything else is subject to removal. Please vote for the ones you want to stay.

Comments

[tomo]

My votes:

Stay:
- Flickr
- Mybloglog

Everything else kicked to the curb. Have you tried accessing from a pda or phone?

Perhaps a solution is to have a widget page that is accessible by a single click at the top of the main page.

I don't get why someone would want anyone else knowing what they search for. Next someone will develop a widget reader which pulls that data and sends you a bunch of spam based on your searches. I just don't get it.

tomo

[Yaniv]

Hi Fred,
As a Widgets developer I agree that your blog is a bit overloaded with widgets.

I would keep only:
- MyBloglog
- Flickr

And replace the LinkedIn badge with LinkedInABox Widget (www.linkedinabox.com)

Cheers,
Yaniv.

[alex]

hey fred

i like the widgets, but i'd suggest you get a bit more discerning. mybloglog and flickr are good, and i'm sure you have your faves, but i think you should bin at least a few!

keep finding new widgets too tho.

alex.

[E. Frederick Pony]

Keep them all. Lose them all. I don't care. I read your RSS feed.

[andre taliercio]

Fred, Why do you care? it is your personal blog after all. Just go with your heart.

[Fraser]

Keep whatever ones you want. The page load time has been resolved, people can read your site in a reader, and your personal blog should be a reflection of what you want to share.

[Toxic]

Get rid of them all, especially MyBlogLog.

[Nate Westheimer]

MyBlogLog

[adam]

Fred,
Ultimately, it's your choice what you do, if it makes you happy, please keep them.

But, that doesn't mean technically that there aren't things that can still be done. i.e. one of Web 2.0's problems is caching. Having dependence on mulitple systems means that you're sending queries out to lots of places. The question then becomes, which of these services provides real, just-in-time data, while others can be updated regularly with local data.

Most of these:

lastfm
streampad
sonos
wallstrip
flickr
amazon
delicious

could be updated perhaps, 3-4 times a day (automatically) and cached locally to improve performace. I don't know if there are plugins for MT that would enable this, but technically, it wouldn't be too hard to create something to do this. This sort of caching would significantly improve load times because 90% of the time, requests would hit the cache. This, of course, wouldn't work with the flash widgets, but would help with the javascript ones.

[Jamie]

Fred;

You should add MBL to the list of keepers. It's "fun" I think, and it is useful for the blogger.

I think some CBA here could be useful and someone who can write a python / pearl script.

What you need to find out is how much benefit you get from each widget and how much traffic you are losing (the cost). This can be estimated easily enough, I think. Generally, I think people are indifferent to widgets so long as they are not intrusive. Latency is an intrusive experience, as well as pop ups and all the other normal things.

What I would then do is try and write some script where there were widgets that showed up 100% of the time, 90% of the time, all the way down to 10% of the time where on any given browsing session you will have some average number of widgets, such that, 95% of all the machines browsing this site will never experience latency.

This way, you can have as many widgets as you want, users never see the lag, and you have the added benefit of a new viewing experience every time someone visits.

[Michael Parekh]

The widget content is part of what Fred Wilson is all about. Who says your thoughts only have to be in terms of textual blog posts.

You've already addressed the loading problem by making the center column load first.

Keep the widgets and add more as you see fit. They're part of you and your audience learning about Web 2.0 together.

It's an important part of the conversation.

Given the controversy, maybe putting them on a second page may be a good compromise.

The whole thing needs more time as folks get used to widgets, and widget developers get used to real folks.

[ming666]

2 comments.

i think the widgets give the site a sort of shabby chic. and anyway who cares - its your site and people come for the conversation not the curtains.

the only time for (polite) guests to comment on the decor is when asked. for example when you asked about snap.com you got alot of interesting pro and mostly con commentary. as someone who thinks widgets are features and not businesses, i found that very interesting. even if you kept snap i would still continue to patronize your blog.

regards from old blighty

[Dave Schappell]

Fred,

You have so many that it's hard to know what's eligible. Could you do this survey with a voting tool/bling like Bix? (yes, it adds one to remove many... but only temporarily!). Then we can focus our efforts...

[Greg Cohn]

Frankly, I think you should keep the widgets and get rid of everything else!

;-)

I'm kidding of course, but only half kidding: isn't the post content of your blog just as easily widgetized at the presentation layer as all the other content?

Isn't a blog just a CMS that pumps content out into both a presentation layer (the blog template - which I guess you could call one big widget that has other widgets embedded in it) and a structured data format (RSS)?

Shouldn't the presentation layer of the internet in general be subject to as much user control as the publisher will allow for any given content?

Shouldn't content presented in widget form be as available in structured form as the publisher will allow?

You don't need a poll, Fred; all you need are "kill this widget" and "subscribe to this widget" buttons.

[AlFromChicago]

Fred --

Not really sure I understand your logic -- you recently solved my biggest problem in making sure the text loaded first -- people vote with their feet -- just delete the ones you want to delete -- if people don't like their widgets isn't the choice for them to come or not to come?

Seeing as how you are one of the most read and certainly influential VC blogs strikes me that choice has been made. This site is for YOU. Do what you want -- in fact, I want to know what YOU want -- that's why I read your blog.

If I want to get a sense of wisdom of the crowds I go to www.buzztracker.com -- this site is about Fred Wilson's voice.

To paraphrase Dick Cheney, you can't run a blog by consensus!

Don't change a thing!

[Andrew]

Remove:

This Next
Root Worms
Facebook
LinkedIn
Last.fm
SP
toubus
yotta

[tbeaton]

please keep the widgets particularly the music widgets.

best,

tom

[Andi]

For my part you can keep all the widgets and search for more to add. I've stopped using an RSS reader because it strips out the character, the context and makes the blog posts work harder to express who the blogger really is.

Which brings me to my point: dump the widgets that are contrary to who you are and what you want to say, only those.

[adrian]

I don't find it too slow and the bling is always interesting, but mostly I keep in touch via RSS so never experience the slowdown anyway.
Keep everything!

[Xena]

I see nothing wrong with using widgets. You can always create another blog with just widgets on it and pretend it's a gizmo gallery. LOL.

[Dan Buell]

My 8 cents:

1. My Stuff - why? We all have stuff...

2. Sonos ad, okay if you must, I understand the charity thing but it does make the page uglier.

3. Vacation Reading - interesting, good, leave it.

4. Flickr - a must.

5. Wallstrip - doesn't interest me personally.

6. House Ads, same as Sonos, keep them if you must otherwise, they're distracting.

7. Delicious Link Roll - I like the concept and haven't figured out a way to use it nicely on my blog yet either - it's unattractive, hard to read, should go until we all can figure out a better way.

8. Job Roll - Yuck!

9. Blogroll - Cool

10. Group Shopcasting - please, make it go away!!!

11. Root Vaults - Yuck!

12. Contextual Advertising - Doesn't work, ditch it.

13. Feedblitz - Good

14. Google Search - It works poorly but I suppose it is okay.

15. Feeds, can you consolidate them some how?

16. My BlogLog - I belong to this community but never understood the value of seeing random stranger's faces on my blog. I don't get it I guess, it's a little too "My Space" for me - ditch it!

17. Gotham Gal stuff is good

18. Podcast - Can you somehow incorporate them into a widget by either Odeo or Streampad?

19. Sonos. Nobody cares.

20. YottaMusic. Another music list. Nobody cares.

21. Tourbus. Nobody cares unless they live a couple of blocks from you.

22. Streampad - keep it. It's a great tool

23. last.fm - who cares?

24. Nuggets - move up higher on the sidebar and add some things to it, would ya? :)

25. alacra - bye bye

26. Categories - fine

27. Archives - fine

28. About - if this is all you're going to have on it, get rid of it.

29. Okay, there's too many and I'm getting bored, all of the rest are fine.

But Fred, remember this... This is your blog, your form of creation, you really shouldn't listen to anybody, including me. If an author solicited critical feedback during a book writing endeavor, the creativity would be lost. You write this blog for yourself and the rest of us are along for the ride! Screw Valleywag!

Dan Buell

[Richard A. Muscat]

Hey Fred,

I admit that its irritating at times to see the little scroll wheel never stopping while it load AVC ... but to be honest I just love reading your stuff that I couln't care less about load times - as long as the content comes up first :-)

Just go ahead and remove whatever's buggin u

Rich

[jf.sellsius]

They are your widgets. You added them for a reason (other than following the madness of crowds). If the reason is no longer good, ditch it. Simple no?

[jf.sellsius]

You might want to check out our widget. If any of your tech savvy readers could enhance it to surf by tags or categories within a blog, it would be more useful:

http://tinyurl.com/y56cpv

(Sorry for the self-promote. It's the capitalist in me :)

[Noel McKinney]

Fred, keep them all, I'm reading this over a wireless connection in firefox on my beat-up old thinkpad (700 MHz). The text loads immediately and the page is fully loaded in a few seconds. No problem. Plus, it's your blog, if something made you want to put up a particular widget in the first place, then that's a part of you that's being shared with the readers.

Something related that I just read is Anna Sebestyén's blog post today on Continuous Partial Attention.