Yesterday, Paul left a great comment making fun of 2.0 "strategy" mentioning "viral funpacks".It was pretty hilarious. But also pretty insightful. Why? Because the realization is slowly dawning in the Valley and other assorted 2.0 scenes of the world that "widgets" are the next big thing.
In no small part, this is due to the revolutionary Myspace music player - the widget that made Myspace more 2.0 than 2.0, by exploding the social value proposition.
Which raises some interesting thinking about the widgets sprouting on desktops and websites.
I started out thinking widgets were an eye-pleasing, but memory-sucking way of getting basic information onto your desktop or web page. Worse, they also tend to have a poor information-to-screen real-estate ratio. A well-designed, if spartan, web page has much more useful information density than a desktop littered in widgets or gadgets dripping in alpha channels, glassy finishes, drop shadows, and anti-aliased text. As an experiment, see if you can get as much useful information above the fold with Yahoo! Widgets (nee Konfabulator) as you can with a My Yahoo! page.
What I think I've neglected to see until now, is the way the widget, as a complete package for a very narrow channel of data or content (others would call it a microchunk or microcontent) can often fit the bill better than the full-on firehose of data that is blasted out in syndication formats like Atom or RSS. If a brand wants to leverage their fans' enthusiasm and networks, what's better: a one liner on a blogroll, or a widget on that same blog?
So I guess I've made the first step towards widgevangelism. It'll be a cold day in hell before I call them "viral funpacks," though.
