My boss just asked me to look into this Techcrunch interview with Eric Feng, CTO of Hulu announcing embeddable widgets for their online media site. Must be a slow news day over at TC. Am I alone in my surprise that Hulu didn’t launch with embeddable widgets?
Here’s the thing, widgets are a fundamental part of modern web communities, information distribution, viral marketing, you name it. Just about anything we are trying to discuss here at Sazbean can involve a widget of some form. They are incredibly important components for building better online businesses. And yet, the term ‘widget’ is getting all fuzzy and nondescript.
The word ‘widget’ has a nasty habit of sticking in the minds of almost anyone who casually reads tech articles hoping to glom onto buzz words they can throw at their IT department in the morning. It sounds just technical enough to be important while retaining the rounded corner friendliness that glosses over all the scary details. Widgets have become MacGuffins you check off on a list, like shifting paradigms and finding synergies. In truth, widgets are invaluable. But to use them correctly, you have to first decide if you are a provider or a consumer.
Widgets themselves are simply small kernels of code. In the web today they exist to extend some content or function out from a single website to hundreds, thousands or millions of separate sites who want that content or function associated with their page. Likely the example with the most exposure is the Google AdSense widget, which is a small kernel of code that Google wrote and millions have placed on their website’s pages. When talking about widgets there are are always two parts to play, like a dance. One part takes the lead by making the widget which connects to either their site or a publicly available, usually popular site (e.g. Flickr or YouTube). The other part follows by embedding that widget in their site’s HTML source code.
From my experience, anyone thinking of adding widgets to their site need first decide on the goal. Do you want to provide your content or service out to the world or are you looking to add content or services onto your business site? Are you looking to drive traffic to your site, or are you hoping to keep them there longer? Is there a service or function for which your online customers are pleading or is there something your site does that is better than the competition that you would like to brand?
The first half of the next series will deal with getting widgets for your site. Useful business widgets that can instantly improve your sites value. Then, we will look at a few services that can take your content and make it into its own widget, something your customers can load on their site and help spread the word.