A VC - Latest Comments in Why Widgets Is The Wrong Word For What We're Doing

Re: Why Widgets Is The Wrong Word For What We're Doing

Arsv.org — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 03:29:38 -0000

thanks

Re: Why Widgets Is The Wrong Word For What We're Doing

Lucas — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 15:10:16 -0000

comparing YMP approach

Re: Why Widgets Is The Wrong Word For What We're Doing

cfrerebeau — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 12:40:25 -0000

What about one widget to rules them all.

- a service could offer you to registered and configured widget for your blog
- user could edit the widget they want to see
- the service could used open id to simplify the use authentication
lot of other cool stuff

Just let the user pick what they want.

Re: Why Widgets Is The Wrong Word For What We're Doing

joshlarson — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 13:45:27 -0000

@fredwilson I'm glad you enjoyed hearing his perspective from a somewhat different angle. Just so you know, the second part of the discussion is now up, too: http://blogs.newsgator.com/...

Re: Why Widgets Is The Wrong Word For What We're Doing

fredwilson — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 17:37:07 -0000

I read the interview

Good addition to the discussion

Re: Why Widgets Is The Wrong Word For What We're Doing

joshlarson — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 16:57:41 -0000

I interviewed NewsGator Widgets' Jeff Nolan for his take on your comments -- from another perspective. You can see that discussion here:

http://blogs.newsgator.com/...

Re: Why Widgets Is The Wrong Word For What We're Doing

fredwilson — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 22:48:04 -0000

It wasn't as good as it could have been

It was missing a discussion of Facebook and RSS

Re: Why Widgets Is The Wrong Word For What We're Doing

fredwilson — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 22:47:07 -0000

FF is doing better than that

It's not twitter 2.0 though

Hopefully that will be twitter 2.0 :)

Re: Why Widgets Is The Wrong Word For What We're Doing

fredwilson — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 22:47:06 -0000

Good point

Should have done that

Embeds rock

Re: Why Widgets Is The Wrong Word For What We're Doing

lawrence coburn — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 17:47:10 -0000

I like consuming content in a river format, but I'm not sure we're going to see the end of the sidebar any time soon. And I also think that there are some widgets that wouldn't make as much sense as their own post in flow - like MyBlogLog (which I agree might be the most interesting widget ever). Maybe a less radical outcome would be to eliminate some of the suckiness of sidebar widgets (maybe cloud computing stuff will help with the performance issues) as opposed to throwing out the whole sidebar.

Re: Why Widgets Is The Wrong Word For What We're Doing

tweetip — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 02:04:21 -0000

nice Nathan :) really really nice

Re: Why Widgets Is The Wrong Word For What We're Doing

Nate — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 23:14:50 -0000

My hourly rate for super successful VCs is quite reasonable :-)

You can email me at nathan@nathanbowers.com.

Re: Why Widgets Is The Wrong Word For What We're Doing

fredwilson — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 22:53:07 -0000

You are hired! How much is all this going to cost me?

Re: Why Widgets Is The Wrong Word For What We're Doing

Nate — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 20:07:19 -0000

Agree with "noise" being the problem. You just have to be choosy. If I was redesigning your blog here's what I would do:

Kill these widgets: "Recent visitors", "Recent Posts", "Eco Safe" (replace it with a print stylesheet), and "My social networks".

Consolidate "Categories" and "Date Archives" into a single archives page.

Consolidate RSS options.

A nice "about" page to tell your story and to point to your social networks, music taste, ventures, etc.

Limit Twitterstream to last 3 tweets.

Consolidate "Stats": I'd just show Feedburner subs (that's the most impressive) and have a separate page for the rest.

Find less noisy widgets for your music and Flickr streams.

Finally, good copy conquers all, so even with noisy sidebars your signal wins.

Re: Why Widgets Is The Wrong Word For What We're Doing

pedalpete — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 18:18:26 -0000

I kinda agree with Fred on this one, but the way I see it, most widgets are focused solely on the blog writer, and not any kind of mash-up of the intersection of where the blog writer and blog reader intersect.

Today I created a quick widget for my site hearWhere which shows concerts anywhere in the world. Rather than take the address of the blog-writer for the location, I use the address for the blog reader. Unfortunately, I don't yet have enough data to create the kind of intersection point of what you should go see in your area because you like Fred's blog. Hopefully in the future, but for now I'm taking a wait and see approach. If people like the widget, I'll go for it, if not, it can die out with the only hint of it's existence being this comment post ;)

Re: Why Widgets Is The Wrong Word For What We're Doing

fredwilson — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 03:38:05 -0000

That's partially why I now have two blogs; avc and fredwilson.vc

Re: Why Widgets Is The Wrong Word For What We're Doing

josh guttman — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 23:34:38 -0000

wow, a discussion that you put together hours before presenting it to 25 people at the brooklyn marriot becomes a leading techmeme post. that's efficiency at its best!!

Re: Why Widgets Is The Wrong Word For What We're Doing

joshs — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 21:38:34 -0000

The slideshare link isn't working for me. I got a few errors generated by the site, then it was really slow to load and now I only get "500 Internal Server Error".

Re: Why Widgets Is The Wrong Word For What We're Doing

Patrick Chanezon — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 20:11:20 -0000

Browser's javascript engine are making a lot of progress: http://webkit.org/blog/189/...
Curious to read your thoughts about OpenSocial. You should give Friend Connect a shot.
http://www.google.com/frien...

Re: Why Widgets Is The Wrong Word For What We're Doing

mrshl — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 20:07:37 -0000

This is why I like FriendFeed. I lean heavily on one widget. It's the only one I have on my blog. And it's one of my favorite few apps on Facebook. There's no need for a bunch of crap on your blog when one widget / service can elegantly communicate your "lifestream." All that FriendFeed is the new Google crap? Meh, it's just that...crap. I've had a hard time getting people to join up. It's simply not gaining traction like Twitter did.

But it's the perfect blog widget, because it brings together all those activities in one place. And it brings them to my blog, which is where I want it to be.

Re: Why Widgets Is The Wrong Word For What We're Doing

davemc500hats — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 19:50:39 -0000

hey fred: speaking of widgets, instead of linking to your presentation on slideshare, why don't you use the EMBED code so it can be displayed here?

(the embed code is displayed on the upper right hand area of the slideshare page)

Re: Why Widgets Is The Wrong Word For What We're Doing

fredwilson — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 18:44:06 -0000

I did not mean widget interaction. Just the ability to have many web services on a single page

Re: Why Widgets Is The Wrong Word For What We're Doing

fredwilson — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 18:10:07 -0000

As many as possible :)

But on a more serious note, some services are best for photos (flickr), some are best for music (last.fm), some are best fot links (delicious), some are best for microblogging (twitter)

That's why this issue has developed

Fred

Re: Why Widgets Is The Wrong Word For What We're Doing

NICCAI — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 17:56:13 -0000

This is the root of the problem. It isn't the size of widgets, but really the number of inline script tags and the resultant domain look-ups that is killing performance and usability. I've been toying with the idea of building some sort of a mashery for widgets, but the simplicity for the end user might be a blocking issue. Ultimately, I think the browser domain policy is crippling.

Re: Why Widgets Is The Wrong Word For What We're Doing

SF — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 16:48:43 -0000

People seem to think there is. Check out OpenAjax Widget Taskforce (http://www.openajax.org/mem... or their presentation - http://www.openajax.org/mem...