Riding the Storm
Thoughts on “The Many Challenges of Widgets”
Jeremiah Owyang, Web Strategist & Senior Analyst at Forrester Research, has posted an interesting post on his blog titled ”The Many Challenges of Widgets”. The post lists 17 points, some of which are related to widget developers, others to the issues faced by marketers utilizing widgets.
Here are my thoughts on some of the issues raised by Jeremiah:
- Overcrowding profile page. Have you seen my profile page on Facebook? It’s a mess, and with so much noise, who can compete? With there being thousands of widgets, only a few can survive on my profile page (I know there is tabbed segmentation) but really, how many do we need?
The logic behind this “challenge” is similar to arguing that RSS feeds are problematic because people have too many feeds in their reader. Widgets are a great marketing tool, just like RSS feeds, and both put the end-user in control. If a user chooses to subscribe to 50 RSS feeds, or place 15 widgets on his/hers profile page, so be it.
- Metrics and Analytics Inconsistencies. Hardly anyone is measuring the success of their widgets in the same way, do we measure on install, activity, views, traffic, or clicks? As a result, other than Appsaholic, there’s very few industry ways to measure success.
I agree that standardization is missing, but widgets (if deployed with the right partner) afford an amazing wealth of data that was not available in the past to marketers and advertisers. MuseStorm allows customers to track and analyze distribution (impressions, unique users, geo-location information and more) as well as activity (interaction, click-throughs and more). Many of our customers were able to optimize their widgets based on this deep data to achieve great results. Like all new technologies and solutions there are inconsistencies between vendors, but these should not prevent savvy marketers from engaging now to gain an edge.
- Spammy. Sadly, I learned from a panel I managed that some of the most successful apps were the one that leaned on the social graph, no not the one that we all dream about, but in the context of email spam. Many containers are clamping down on this, as it’s best to preserve the user experience, but this could continue to be an issue.
While there are many “spammy” applications out there, most competent widget/application providers will stir marketers away from behavior like the one described above. At MuseStorm, our client services team has tons of experience and has been helping customers achieve success the right way. Choose the right partner.
- Disposable and low value. Rodney Rumford first mentioned this term to me, he was describing that many widgets are simply not used more than once. These glamor widgets provide one time entertainment, or are used once and never reused –except for removing from ones profile page.
This is a great point that Jeremiah is raising. Many marketers are not aware of the work that has to go into keeping a widget fresh and engaging long term. Many widget providers don’t bother talking about this challenge and utilize a “hit and run” strategy - sell and forget. At MuseStorm, we have the methodology and the tools to help marketers succeed over time.
- Hard to build successfully. Specialized skill set are common among the developers, most traditional interactive firms, and most companies don’t have the skills or experience to create a widget. It’s a different game with a different mindset, the same strategies often don’t apply.
Jeremiah really nailed it with this one! a common scenario for a marketer is to approach end-users across a variety of distribution channels, from facebook to MySpace to startpages. Each of these requires a different skill set and assembling multiple development teams is expensive and slow. At MuseStorm, our production studio allows non-technical personnel to create almost any type of social applications and widgets, easily. Working with MuseStorm makes this a non-issue.
- Multiple APIs strain developers. Most platforms or containers are offering their own API, although most are touting they are OpenSocial compliant (as I write this, OpenSocial is
not public, it is but in beta but should be soon) yet we’ve got to wonder is it too late for there to be a common industry API if it’s already fragmented?...
Again, I could not agree more. The frequent changes of the underlying mechanisms of social networks, coupled with the pace of innovation and new entrants, make it even more important to select your widget platform partner wisely.
- Ever changing platform APIs requires attentive team. When I hosted the widget roundtable, it became very clear that the APIs on platforms are quickly changing, and sometimes without notice. For the agile developer company, they’ll be able to quickly morph with their full time resources, but for the Interactive Firm or corporate web team, they’ll likely be too slow.
See my comments on the previous point. Bingo.
- Performance Issues. Pravda (via comments) suggests that some widgets have poor performance, and thereby causes a disrupted experience. Since widgets are hosted on third party servers, some laggards can hinder the rest of the social network experience, he states: “This is because they require additional HTTP request, and in some cases, this request delays the rest of the page. This is the reason that I am not using Meebo widget in my blog”.
Again, I think Jeremiah is wrong here, pretty much as with the first point about over crowding. Performance issues are not a general “widget” issue, they are an issue of bad implementation and thus an issue of selecting the wrong partner. Like everything else online, make sure you select the right solution to make your users’ experience the best it can be.
Bottom Line
Thanks Jeremiah, for raising the issues. MuseStorm is here for those marketers who would like a solution that takes care of all these challenges, professionally and from the ground up.
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