• by Kathy Sharpe , November 1, 2007

These little chunks of code can really dress up a Web page

The very word “widget” sounds diminutive and non-intrusive. It hardly sounds descriptive of something capable of disruption, let alone portending a significant shift in the Internet landscape. But widgets are and they do.

This role wasn’t in any way foreseeable when the first widgets appeared online. Originally, widgets were basic downloadable applications. The Yahoo weather widget, still available today, remains a familiar example of this early stage widget. Download it to your desktop and with a click it will tell you the current weather in your area. A direct feed from Yahoo keeps it live whenever you are online. Google developed analogous “Gadgets.” The widget seemed pretty well defined as a little app that distributed branded information to the desktop and linked that desktop back to the site.

But nothing is ever permanently defined on the Internet.

Google and Yahoo opened up their different proprietary tools to the developer community and thousands of informational widgets as varied as their inventors’ interests became available. For instance, there are now widgets to keep you up-to-date on matters ranging from local sports scores to the CPU of your hard drive. All were originally designed for download to the desktop and, at first, seemed to offer few implications for commerce.

Then a few marketers made the leap, realizing that sitting on someone’s desktop wasn’t the worst place to be when you wanted to announce a sale, or push the latest product. Widgets as distributed desktop storefronts had real potential, and retailers like Target got into the act by 2006.

These widgets were slightly more robust than their predecessors, with deeper behavioral tracking, broader content and richer visual display. They allowed consumers to shop without venturing out of the personal space of their desktop, going to the Web only when they wanted to complete the sale. The widget’s informational capabilities were not wielded in the name of commerce and the results were guaranteeing widgets a place in retailers’ marketing toolkits.

At about the same time, a new phenomenon was beginning to re-shape the Web: user-generated content. By creating content, consumers can easily extend their personal space from their desktops to the Web at large in a multitude of forms: Facebook pages, blogs, Twitterfeeds and the like. 

Developers saw a rich environment for a range of little and big applications: countless downloadable pieces of Flash art that glitter a band’s logo (and lead to the band’s Web site with a click) used on a college student’s MySpace page; applications with an executable file that will re-size photos on a blog or sharable rich media that showcase products or movies with extras such as specs or RSS feeds.

This array of applications is downloaded and shared across the Internet and, more frequently now, embedded on Web pages. These small chunks of code distribute information, drive distribution to sites and enhance site experience. They are all called widgets.

Whether they offer content, games, tools, information or ads, widgets completely depend on the consumer for distribution and placement. Widgets of today enable that much heralded shift from Network Broadcast to One to One Media.

Google’s and others’ ad widgets will be dependent on a consumer-based media distribution system. Measurable perhaps, predictable probably, but finally out of their control. Those little widgets may just turn the media universe upside down. 

Kathy Sharpe is CEO of Sharpe Partners, a digital marketing and media agency. (sharpepartners.com)