Welcome to JeffreyVeffer.com

This was based on a talk by Dion Hinchcliffe at the Web2.0 Expo, Tuesday April 17, 2007

Important trends-

• Web sites with portable content and functionality
• Putting modular web parts on the blogs and profiles to host the pieces of the web that they want to share
• Realization the there is limited value being on one site
• Atomization of content – smaller pieces are easier to reuse
• Microformats are the smallest pieces
• Do it yourself trend is combining with the rise of web portable content and functionality- people help themselves

Web as a parts “Superstore”
Little question that the web is turning into a sort of online Home Depot with its shelves line with thousand of useful off the shelf parts of every description and utility- a lot of problems users can solve themselves w/o programmers

Jakob’s law

• Users spend most of their time somewhere else
• Design your products and service to leverage the fact

Widgetbox

• Everyone has a channel on the web, end users remixing the web out of parts.
• Javascript, flash, WPF/E

How to think about it?

• Build open platforms instead of stand alone apps- self distributing ecosystems
• Spread you product beyond your site- APIs, badges, syndication
• Standing on the shoulders of giants- leverage Yahoo, Amazon etc.
• Automated mass servicing of markets with low demand content and functionality (Long tail) – bulk of the demand

What are they?

• Widgets- small apps that can be embedded on the web – can be AJAX or flash- usually pulled live from the site.
• Badges – displays of content pulled under the covers from other sites (more of content display)
• Gadgets – more formal widget models from Google and Microsoft

Key aspects

• Supreme ease of consumption and distribution – copy and paste is best; single line Javascript includes (Google maps); Object embed tags for flash
• Connect to the underlying sites to provide value and control as well
• Have a business model backed deeply into it – driving site traffic content consumption, advertising.

Power of widgets

• Makes your web apps functionality and content portable
• Works anywhere not just on your site
• Network effects via viral propagation
• Supply both mashups as well as hosting on blogs wikis

Users

• Consumers – moving content and functionality they want to where they need it
• o Building simple dashboard and applications
• Developers and Prosumers
• o Easy to integrate with high value functionality
• Business
• o External sourcing of functionality and content
• o Web apps built on top of the shoulders…

Widget stories

• Youtube video badge
• o Highly viral excellent end user motivation
• Uses web as a content billboard
• Consistently drives user growth, video views and traffic back to the site
• Didn’t take the users intelligence for granted
• Showed the raw code for hosting right next to every video

Google adwords widget

• o Most successful widget in history
• Drives enormous revenue to Google
• Turns entire web into Google ad platform
• Key aspects
• o Good user incentive
• o Extreme ease of use
• o Strong viral feedback loop

Business Case

• Content on millions of other pages
• Let users broaden you distribute globally at virtually not cost
• Turn your apps into open platforms and foundation of dozen of other products (or leave majority of value of online product and services untapped)
• o AMZN has 50k businesses build on top

Key design considerations

• Scalability
• Cost effectiveness
• Reliability
• Exploitation of others
• Global reach
• Security
• o Think through all the cross domain issue, sharing of personal data (eg pictures and video)
• IP issues
• o Do you have a license to redistribute the content?
• o Con other violate the IP protection of others
• o Do you widget make it hard to other to take content out of the widget
• Not losing control
• Ease of Consumption
• o Must be really simple copy and paste
• Leverage network effects
• o Encourage every view to share
• End user motivation
• o Only if it does something useful for them
• o Sharing interesting content, shared access to person data or even paying them (as Google does)
• Enabling mashusp
• o Widgets are key ingredient to the mashup phenomenon
• Many believe this is new app dev model
• o Widgets provide raw ingredients to this
• Build in weeks vs months

Examples

• Flashearth
• Zillow.com

Business mashups

• Mckinsey- 10% of companies are looking at mashups inside the firewall

Recommendations

• Small pieces loosely joined
• Simplicity and extreme loose coupling
• Reuse the web palette first
• SLAs will get more interesting
• Get experience now- begin trials to offer your capabilities or services
• Make sure it legal to build business from profitable for others and extremely easy to do
• Provide minimum of restrictive structure and make it possible for users to do it themselves

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