Paul Kedrosky points to a new service called PostApp, which is a new widgets syndication service currently in private beta. While the sign-up page doesn’t go into detail about what PostApp does, Fergus Burns from Nooked has an interesting post on this subject:
“A new space is beginning to develop – widget marketing.
Led initially be desktop widget services such as konfabulator, we are now seeing tons of services supporting widgets/gadgets – especially in social media applications (typepad, wordpress, myspace, aimpages, netvibes, etc).
I’ve noted some recent startup activity specifically @ widgets – Snipperoo, PostApp, Tagworld, and a mobile widget venture from Nokia Labs, called Widsets.
All these startups are going to make “widget” placements in social media services easy – rather than the current “html/javascript” hacking – watch out for tons of innovation.”
Note: Nooked is one of my clients.
I too have been tracking the growing importance of widgets, especially as it relates to the Personalized Start Pages space – Microsoft Live gadgets, Google’s modules, Netvibes and Pageflakes, and of course Yahoo’s konfabulator (although not yet integrated in a big way into MyYahoo). As Fergus notes, widgets are spreading into many areas now – into blogging platforms like Typepad and WordPress, social networking systems like MySpace and AIMPages, etc. And now there’s a whole new segment growing – which Fergus nicely labels “widget marketing”.
This is all being driven by the increasing use of microcontent and web services in all kinds of web-based services – such as Windows Live, MySpace and WordPress. I used to talk a lot about the Two-Way Web as it relates to webpages – that people have the ability to publish their own blogs, interact with e-commerce sites such as Amazon, etc. Nowadays it’s all about The Two-Way Web App! You can interact and ‘write’ to any number of small web services-driven apps. And aggregation services such as Netvibes and Pageflakes can pack as many of these mini-apps onto one page as you care to add.
Snipperoo is another widget service to watch out for. It’s a service to create and manage widgets – Ivan Pope is behind it. Also check out Zenrob’s post on MySpace’s widget strategy, where he suggests that deploying more widgets may be the key to MySpace’s monetization.
There’s no doubt about it – widgets are are fast-growing area of innovation and I expect to see more companies like PostApp and Snipperoo popping up to take advantage of this trend.
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)