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Spring Widgets
Lot's of discussion about widgets these days. Brad Stone's piece in the NY Times today about MySpace blocking widgets (in which I was quoted) got me thinking about Fox's own Spring Widgets platform.
Spring Widgets are like many of the widget development platforms out there. You create your widget in the Spring Widgets service and you can run it "anywhere". Or at least that's the value proposition that Spring Widgets and the other widget platforms present. Brad's piece suggests that you can't run many of them in MySpace right now.
Funny enough, I've been told that MySpace is currently blocking Spring Widgets [correction - MySpace is not blocking Spring Widgets but the outbound links in the widget are broken]. Maybe Spring Widgets, Fox' own widget platform, isn't yet in compliance with the MySpace terms of service. Or maybe there is another reason. I honestly have no clue.
I do like the way the Spring Widgets have integrated FeedBurner's feed management service into their platform, as Pete at Mashable explained in this post.
I've been pretty vocal about the need for widget platforms to support feeds. I don't want to have to publish to my widget. I want my feed to be that interface. Write once, read everywhere. That's how the web should work, widgets included. So I like that Spring Widgets supports that notion.
Now we gotta figure out why MySpace is blocking them isn't doing more to promote Spring Widgets.
March 20, 2007 Venture Capital and Technology | Comments (6)
Comments
myspace probably believes that the widgets would or could contain advertising not approved by them. That is the reasoning for the Revver block on myspace:
TechCrunch talked to MySpace, and was told “In the instance of Revver specifically, we [MySpace] told them we were going to block them if they continued to sell ads on our pages. They refused to stop selling ads on our pages – so we blocked them. No mystery there.”
So myspace's deal with Google for ads will probably let YouTube slide by on this...neat.
Posted by: Andy Swan | Mar 20, 2007 12:15:09 PM
We love Spring Widgets -- for us they've provided a great solution for our 1,100 topic pages and counting -- on each page you can click on the gear icon and it automatically creates the widget for you. Go to http://www.buzztracker.com/category/venture_capital
and check it out
Posted by: AlFromChicago | Mar 20, 2007 1:09:14 PM
Spring Widget is a great platform. It is pretty ridiculous that their RSS syndication widget doesn't work on myspace. You can syndicate a feed through a springwidget so that people can publish their blog feed on myspace, but the individual posts are not it clickable from the widget.
Posted by: Peter Caputa | Mar 20, 2007 1:19:11 PM
I just found this blog from a search and the times article. The topics here are right in line with what I am doing based off monetizing social networks. I have a patent-pending technology that is as big as friendster's social network patent but for monetizing widgets on social networks. I believe I have solved one of the greatest challenges companies like hooka are facing and I have had the rare opportunity to "interview" myspace on many levels to find out why and how they feel the need to 'block to protect'. I would like to talk to someone who can help me fund the venture from an angel/seed level. My idea is solid, unique, and gets around the barriers that many cannot find when trying to monetize sites like myspace. E-mail me so we can talk, I live in Los Angeles and just begining to build a team. I'm a NY native tho. Love blogs like this, it's amazing that I do have the solution, lets get it going. Soon, everyone is going to get blipd!
Posted by: Ty Graham | Mar 20, 2007 3:38:43 PM
The firm that appears at the forefront of "Write once, run anywhere" (for widgets) is Netvibes, whose "ecosystem" dev environment deploys widgets across Apple, Yahoo, Google, MSFT and others -- I haven't seen mention of this on A VC (but may have missed a post).
A prior post indicates that Feedburner is going in this direction, and good for them, but there's a fundamental difference between Feedburner's focus and that of Netvibes -- Netvibes counts consumers as it's "customers," a key distinction.
Feedburner provides "blogger plumbing," and perhaps it's a straightforward transition to being a widget provider, but I would argue there's a key distinction between being an "enabler" (Feedburner) or a "consumer-facing" firm (Netvibes). You can see this is the "Browser Friendly" page that Feedburner provides -- it's still awkward. When you add a feed to Netvibes, it's much cleaner, and that's not even Netvibes' focus -- they simply come from an orientation of keeping it simple for the consumer.
So I'd argue two things:
1. There is room for "a Feedburner for widgets," even if Feedburner is moving in that direction (more slowly than others).
2. There is more than just "feed-enabling" widgets that's required -- there's providing great consumer experiences, something still lacking in current "enablers."
Posted by: Chris | Mar 21, 2007 11:47:03 AM
This is why the widgets are neutered:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/07/20/myspace-security-measure-disables-viral-spread-of-widgets/
Flash 9 allows site owners (e.g. MySpace) to disable outbound links in embedded flash files.
There's an easy way around it, though... just give the user an html snippet which includes a) the widget, and b) a plain old link next to the widget. Unfortunately, seems like you can't do this with SpringWidgets, since the user gets the html snippet directly from SpringWidgets.com.
It sounds like the value proposition SpringWidgets is really pushing, though, is to make it easy to create widgets that work both online and on the desktop... sort of like Adobe Apollo "lite."
Posted by: Altay | Mar 21, 2007 5:33:17 PM
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