Curing Widget Fever

The same week we started StepChange, Newsweek declared 2007 "The Year of the Widget". Even today I wonder if this was some kind of omen. This article got me thinking about widgets a LOT. I devoured every bit of information I could about the world of widgets, started installing them on a test blog, configured a Netvibes and YourMinis page, and began searching out developers that could build widgets for our clients. It’s safe to say I had a bad case of widget fever…

Although most widgets I looked at seemed like a novelty (most of them still are), I soon realized that there was something compelling about having a mechanism that could widely distribute content and users could (and would) redistribute and redeploy it for you.

It turns out I wasn’t alone in my thinking about widgets. Check out the Technorati graph below that I grabbed from an appropriately named site called widgetbubble.com.

It’s an interesting visualization of the rapid growth of widget coverage over the last year across the blogosphere. In just under 6 months the number of posts about "widgets" per day went from under 20 to over 1000. Guess I wasn’t the only one who caught the "fever".

Now, don’t get me wrong, getting into and/or developing widgets isn’t a bad thing, it’s just difficult to sift through the thousands of widgets that are out there to see if any of them are actually useful and what makes them popular.

We use the term "Widget Fever" a lot in the office these days because we get calls all the time from clients wanting to build a widget but they don’t seem to know why. Hopefully, I can help you with a cure… Don’t just create a widget because everyone else has one. Widgets can be a powerful marketing tool if designed and built right, and I’ve compiled a few tips to get you started:

1. A Widget is a Product. Treat it like one. Know your widget goals, know your target user, know your target platform (blogs, Facebook, etc.), and design accordingly.
2. Make it Fun. An interactive widget that makes people want to play with your widget is much better than something static. Also, have something that changes dynamically or better yet something that changes based on user interaction.
3. Reward the User. Give them something new everyday. Incent them to come back or share it with a friend.
4. Make the Design Flexible and Configurable. Users like to choose colors, fonts, and size so it will fit in well with their site. Remember in a lot of cases you are asking the user to give up potentially valuable revenue generating real estate to deploy your widget.
5. Easy to Get and Share. Use public API’s to support auto installs on platforms for blogs, social networks, and desktop widget platforms. There are also lot of widget platforms such as Clearspring & WidgetBox that can provide a shell to auto-deploy the widget on other sites

Anyway, I have to get back to making widgets. Speaking of, we’ve got a widget coming out that we built in conjunction with Offermatica in a few weeks. Check out CLIQin if you want to get on the beta list. Next up, on to finding a cure for "Facebook" fever…