All your widgets are belong to us
This week, I have been delving into widgets and widget marketing (for lack of a better phrase). You have all seen widgets before; they are the cool little mini-apps that you might find on your favourite websites or blogs. If you have a Mac, you can find them on your own desktop. If you have a PC, you can download Yahoo’s Widget Engine to give them a test drive. You know…Widgets! Everyone seems to be talking about widgets lately, so I thought I would chime in with my .02.
Once upon a time, there was little internet startup called MyBlogLog. They built this neat little widget that you could plug into your blog, which showed photos of all of your friends and acquaintances (who also happen to use the “service”). Now, everyone that comes to your site can see just how popular you are. **sigh**
The story goes a little something like this. MyBlogLog went live in June of 2006. A bunch of people tried it, because it was all, like, new and cool and shit. Bloggers, and most notably SEO bloggers, adopted it. Yahoo saw the SEO community and the internet opinion makers embrace this groovy little app and bought them for 10 million just a couple weeks ago.
This is a relatively trivial tool developed for egomanics by a unknown company that somehow…miracuously…saw their product or service or whatever it is, go viral. They tipped! I was stupified when I heard about the sale. What made this product stand out among the others? Perhaps it is the user data that Yahoo! has placed such a high value on? People have been building cool little web-apps forever. We built one a couple years ago for a fundraising site, but it was intended as a link development tool. We got a few thousand links out of it…mission accomplished…but surely not worth 10 million dollars. One could certainly buy a lot of links for 10 million dollars!
The following is a collection of posts and articles on widgets and widget marketing:
I don’t know about you, but I am dreaming about the potential of widgets…
What really helped MBL take off from the beginning was the analytics system. I used it because it gave me handy dandy (and light) stats about my blog traffic, from where it came and to where it was being sent. the widgets really came afterwards, when they turned it into a community in & of itself. It’s a cool case study, for sure.
Comment by abhilash — January 23, 2007 @ 7:06 pm