I’m here at Widgets Live in San Francisco, where Dan Strauss and Don Synstelien from Fox Interactive Media are onstage talking about their new widget platform called SpringWidgets. The defining feature of this product is that it works on both the desktop (like Konfabulator) and in the browser (like Google widgets). However the desktop part is Windows only for now – Mac support is coming.
Their showcase widget currently is the RSS Reader widget – it displays rss feeds, video and podcasts. If you have a Feedburner feed, you can customize your widget, which came about as a result of a partnership between FIM and Feedburner. SpringWidgets has a developer platform too, so the platform is flexible for publishers and developers alike.
The other defining feature is that SpringWidgets can be easily shared – users can click a small green icon (the widgets equivalent to the orange ‘subscribe’ button) and put the widget either on their website/blog, social network (e.g. MySpace), their desktop, or all of the above.
As Mike Arrington noted, Microsoft is probably SpringWidgets’ biggest competitor – as they will have widgets built into Vista. But also watch out for both Yahoo and Google, as these days all of the big players need widgets to be usable across desktop-Web. As we have explored at length recently on Read/WriteWeb, desktop/browser integration is increasingly important in the Web world. Indeed Google already offers two types of gadgets: desktop plug-ins for the Google Desktop and Personalized Homepage gadgets for the Web. Yahoo of course has a strong desktop widgets platform (previously known as Konfabulator).
As for SpringWidgets, being a FIM property means that MySpace integration will be key to their rollout success. But it’s interesting to see SpringWidgets casting a much wider net than just the MySpace platform – other web platforms plus desktop too. It means they’re taking on the big Internet companies like Microsoft, Google and Yahoo. More proof that widgets are an increasingly important trend – certainly the hot thing amongst the early adopter geeks right now, as podcasting was last year at this time and RSS the year before.
Update:StickiWidgets points out that SpringWidgets is potentially a great platform for distributing Fox’s own media content.
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)