Widget, Mash-up, Mashet, Widge-up, Mix-in
Stowe Boyd wants to called them “Widge-ups”. (He’s joking) Snipperoo calles it “the give and take web”. Microsoft calls them Gadgets.
Fergus Burns thinks that there will be a hit with Widget Marketing.
Richard MacManus has a great post on Widget Services ramping up.
PostApp has something called WidgetBox which even has a logo that looks like a blue version of my AJAX Badge.
But… before anyone gets crazy…. I open sourced that Logo. And how else are you going to indicate cross-functionality. And…ok… so I was inspired by the Yahoo Widget logo.
PostApp’s concept is very cool. Like Zoho’s Polls and MajikWidget, it turns Blogs and Wikis into a platform for building web based applications. This is the beginning of the operating system in the cloud.
The important thing about these widgets is that you can have lots of them in one post. This is different from a widget on a side bar. It is, actually, much more powerful.
While at CTC, I saw two tools that used blog post widgets connect bloggers to whole sets of back-end functionality. Trumba provides a powerful way of publishing event information. WebAsyst provides a cool way of gathering emails contact information and using it to send out update emails.
The three big widget challenges
- Today’s widgets are for super users - we need widgets for end users. Today, connecting these widgets into blog posts involving a cut & paste of html and AJAX code. Usually, this means an iframe, which means the content is not searched by a search engine. Ideally, a standard is developed that is used by all blog and wiki tools. With that standard, end users would be able to simply hit an insert Widget button and see the content included in their blog post, etc.
- Enterprise users will need access control, authentication and audit trails. If the workings of a web page come from multiple web servers, enterprise users will need an organizing tool that connects things together at the back end.
- We need a name Widgets are normally not interactive. They just give you the weather. Mash-ups connect information in two site, but that doesn’t exactly apply here. I thought of calling them a Mashet. Stowe Boyd told me “A man coins his own term for something at his own risk”. Stowe is probably right. But then again, Stowe wants to call these things a “Widge-up”.
It was William James: “A man coins a new word at his own risk.”
I was actually joking with you, I think “widge-ups” and “mashets” are both dumb terms. Widgets they are, and widgets they’ll be, no matter how much the ground shifts under our feet.
Snipperoo is all about No. 1 on your list of ‘big widget challenges’. We’re about doing away with the roadblock that is the cut and paste request. Once we’ve done that, almost anything is possible. We work with and for widget producers, we don’t produce widgets ourselves. It’s the give and take web.
I prefer the term “flake”! :-)
Since your first ‘challenge’ correctly identifies the end user as the primary target market, shouldn’t the ‘branding’ of the terminology also focus on the end-user instead of the current terminology which has all been coined by the super-user community?
I don’t like any of the Web 2.0 terminology and I honestly think that is the biggest obstacle to adoption in the non-super-user market. A brand name should not require training to understand it - a brand name should evoke an immediate understanding of the product. All Web 2.0 names fail to do this.
How stupid is it to come up with a brilliant and simple product, concept, or idea and give it a name that nobody understands?
I think Kris has said an important fact there. How many people have stayed away from linux because they cannot figure out what the programmes do? I am new to the concepts of web 2 and find the whole idea of community exiting. Not least because it opens the possibility to finaly create a unique political and social body out of ordinary people. But first they have to be involved.
Kris, you say ‘A brand name should not require training to understand it - a brand name should evoke an immediate understanding of the product.’
This is a total misunderstanding of how brand names work (or as we used to say, confuses the signifier with the signified). Give me a brand name that, in its raw state, evokes and immediate understanding of the product? Apple? Microsoft? Ford? Kodak? Dell? Google? Yahoo? All of these have come to be instantly recognisable, but they hardly describe anything (apart perhaps the name of the founder for some of them). The only one that comes anywhere close to being descriptive is Microsoft, and even that is hardly a help (small sponges?). Maybe Coca-cola comes close to merging the signified and the signifier, but anyone can tell you that brands become, they are not anything when they start.
Hi Rod
Thanks for the mention - much appreciated
I agree that we need better widgets for end-users
Best Regards
Fergus