The Entropyneurs of Widgetworld

I attended the Chinwag event on Widgetisation last night, very interesting it was too, and for a number of reasons.

The format was firstly some brief talks, and then interesting questions and comments, from a good cross section of speakers:

- Mark Taylor - Head of Content, Eircom

- George Berkowski - Head of Internet Strategy, BT Retail

- Fergus Burns - CEO & Founder, nooked

- Jonathan Gabbai - Solutions Manager, eBay

- Kaj Häggman - Business Development Manager & Inventor, WidSets (WidSets was born out of the Nokia Emerging Business Unit)

- Chair: Steve Bowbrick

The "Entropyneurs" bit comes from Steve's Intro where he noted that creative destruction was the interaction of the forces of entropy and enthalpy and the entrepreneurs on the panel tonight were on the destructive end (hence Entropyneurs - geddit ? .

I took some notes, will transcribe later (later note...naaah, two excellent writeups already here and here) but the really interesting things happened after the main sessions, during the Q&A and the apres-speeches - but there was one very interesting point raised, which was that a widget has an optimal (small) size and probably cannot be too big or it in turn will be widgetised. (I also think there is a minimum size or else its nothing but a popup 2.0)

There were three other main things that interested me about the whole evening:

Firstly, the speakers at one point were asked to define a widget - there were 5 different definitions, and the floor came up with a whole lot more. As a public service, here is Wikipedia:

A web widget is a portable chunk of code that can be installed and executed within any separate HTML-based web page by an end user without requiring additional compilation. They are akin to plugins or extensions in desktop applications. Other terms used to describe a Web Widget include Gadget, Badge, Module, Capsule, Snippet, Mini and Flake.

It is interesting however that there is such disagreement.

One also assumes the word "mobile" replaces "web" for mobile widgets? (Wikipedia has no section on mobile widgets, which probably says a lot in itself - will add some of the notes from mobile monday's wiget event later on)

(Postscript - Tim Ellis posted a link on mobile monday group to this widget industry map)

Secondly, there are apparently 25+ different widget platforms, none of which really inter-operate, and thats not counting mobile platform differences. This is not exactly a recipe for mass adoption and scaling (more on this later)

Thirdly, no one really had a clue about how the commercial models may work...the standard advertising / data capture / value sharing models were all advanced, but (in my humble opinion) pretty half heartedly.

From that point of view, widgets are still by and large entropic, as they destroy things before they allow new value to be created. In fact, at one point one of the speakers proposed "Symbiotic" and "Parasitic" as ways of classifying different widgets.

I happened to be standing next to a chap and started bandying some comments with him, he turned out to be Stowe Boyd - a blogger of some renown . its always good to put faces to the blogs, and I asked him his views re widgets. Stowe noted that:

- firstly, that widgets were probably a very temporary part of the Web evolution, rather than an objective in themselves.

- secondly, that scaling was going to be very troublesome...one widget is one thing, every single company trying to fling widgets around embedding on each other was another.

I'd agree with this. Stowe also felt there was too much attention on commercial models and that user experience will drive widget adoption. I'd agree sycophantically re users, but we disagreed re how many widgets can dance on a website...my view is that a "useful" website can't take too many widgets and remain functional - though the idea of a "wigdet carrier" website is fascinating.

In my defence I cite the following witnesses

(i) Jakob Nielsen, arguing that Web 2 sites are being peppered with personalisation tools and were in danger of resembling the "glossy but useless" sites at the height of the dotcom boom.

(ii) Vodafone's Steve Devo, who eerily echoed my concern in a post on mobile monday group today when he noted that:

Then this leads me to a worry about the UE and IA of widgets. Supposing I have a lot of really good widgets, what's the best way to organise them on screen, so that i
can find/use them easily, and not forget about those residing in the corners as it were.
[out of sight, out of mind]
Perhaps a tag cloud might work with colour and size used to reflect the popularity or
pertinence of the widget ?

Piers Jones comes to a fairly similar set of thoughts too...

As always a great evening, ably operated behind the scenes by Deirdre "She Who Must Be Obeyed" Molloy, who also has a very useful blog here