widgets all over the place!

Posted on | November 7, 2006 | No Comments

yesterday definitely was “widget-day”, as WidgetsLive, the first conference solely centerend on web-widgets took place in san francisco. of all the talks & product-announcements (read Liz Gannes’ extensive coverage at GigaOM), Fox Interactive’s launch of their widget-platform SpringWidgets (beta) was probably the hottest topic of the day.

while I tend to find most widget-engines quite generic and similar in featuresets, SpringWidgets is unique in several ways: while competing platforms run their widgets either on the local desktop (f.e. Yahoo! Widgets, ex Konfabulator) or exclusively on the web (f.e. Google Gadgets), SpringWidgets’ code can be executed in both environments. widgets like the RSS-reader on the sidebar of this page, can be easily pulled to the desktop by just clicking the green cog (top-left). the desktop-software SpringBox is currently available for Windows only, with a Mac OS-version to follow soon. SpringWidgets integration with several social networking-sites is even better: widgets can be sent to profile pages on myspace, friendster, hi5 and xanga with a single click. as usual, html-snippets are used to get SpringWidgets on any other webpage (see screenshot below).

unlike most competitors which are using some sort of xml/html/javascript, SpringWidgets is based on flash-technology. while this hopefully will bring us multimedia widgets incorporating streaming audio & video, it might turn out problematic since it forces developers to use Adobe’s expensive Flash development-kit. however, this potential handicap in SpringWidgets’ adoption will probably be easily compensated by Fox’ ability to push the platform towards billions of myspace-users.

update: TechCrunch points out that Microsoft’s widget-platform included in Vista will also run locally and on live.com sites.

 

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