Ubercool

Of Widgets and Apps

August 7th, 2008

On Tuesday, Paris Hilton released a political viral video. The two-minute video received a lot of air play. In part, the video was symbolic of the shift taking place in society: Our standard of communication has devolved into short assemblies of fleeting imagery, ideal for mass consumption in a multitasking world.

Similarly, social networks are also contributing to a sea change shift that is inundating the online world. Small snippets of code have already invaded the realms of Facebook and iPhone, quickly showing that small can be beautiful. Apple’s Application Store already features more than 1,550 applications, nearly a month after the release of iPhone software capable of adding these “apps.”

Facebook, which opened its architecture to developers in May 2007, has more than 25,000 applications that can be added by the user. The avalanche of these small software apps is guaranteed to turn into a flood as marketers and users alike begin to realize the ease with which these “widgets” can be created and unleashed.

Of the more than 1,500 applications available for the iPhone only a handful promote brands, like the above Chanel application. That’s bound to change as marketers begin to realize that this community of 10 million trendsetters is worth reaching.

Last night, more than 240 people attended SF New Tech’s “Widgets Up The Wazoo” event in San Francisco. The organizer of the event, Myles Weissleder, added a second monthly meeting focused on this topic after June’s event on the same subject quickly sold out.

The crowd was not disappointed. Like our previous report on last year’s Facebook’s Developer Garage, it’s becoming clear that the wave of the future are small, vertical apps that quickly and easily deliver fairly narrow results. The impact will not be lost on Madison Avenue. Already some brands are discovering the branding opportunities that these applets offer.

Facebook boasts such brands as Ben & Jerry’s, Coca-Cola, Crocs, GAP, Mars, McDonald’s, Neutrogena and Starbucks, among others. Some online marketing outfits, like LiveWorld, are helping marketers mobilize the social network space. LiveWorld’s LiveEngage Widget Series 1.0 is being used by Neutrogena set up widget shop in Facebook.

Facebook realized early on that aggressively recruiting developers to add widgets to its social network was key to its success. To that end, the company has established the fbFund to encourage application developers to come up with new Facebook winners.

The iPhone is still virgin territory, so few brands have discovered its potential: British Airways, Chanel, Carling Breweries and Hotels.com are all we found. Yet, there’s no question that due to the heavy use of Macs among advertising creatives this void will be filled rapidly.

One key challenge of widget building has been met conclusively by iWidget, which offers a drag-and-drop service to build your own Facebook or MySpace application.

The SF New Tech demos showed just how quickly one can build and distribute applications on both Facebook and MySpace. Audience favorites included Gigya and iWidget, which let you distribute and build your own widget, respectively.

Gigya claims that its distribution network counts some 142 million widget users. iWidget, meanwhile, features a very simple, visual-based widget builder that can turn any relatively sophisticated technosexual into mainstream widget builder.

We’ve seen the future and it’s small.

Entry Filed under: Internet, Marketing