arghyle

You probably did not know this, but yesterday was Widgetcon. I was of the 100 or so people that attended the event, despite not being a widget A-lister like many of the people there. Aside from using widgets from time to time, my experience with them is relatively limited. I’m not a developer and I don’t work on any sites like rockyou.com but I am interested in widgets and their implications, specifically for content providers.

I did not expect much from the conference, but I did assume I would learn a lot and meet some great people. After spending a consider piece of yesterday at the event (it was an all-day ordeal) I can say that the latter is true, though I’m not sure how much I really learned.

Jeremy Pepper pointed out that he thought the con was more about the advertising and marketing of widgets than anything else. His post on the matter was also pretty harsh, but not without basis- a lot of the conference was about tracking and marketing and figuring out the one all-important thing about widgets- how do we make money off of them. It was not all about this though, people also brought up the importance of widgets syncing with one another and standardization (which is especially important at this point). User experience often took a backseat, but I think that was more because a lot of the people thought they had that figured out while standardization and monetization can be much trickier.

Steven Rubel gave a pretty good keynote, though we had to wait until after 2pm for it. He was also concerned about things like tracking, but brought about some really good points about wider adoption of widgets, alternate uses, and using widgets to makes sites friendlier for users. He also missed out on talking about the community experience of widgets, demonstrated a very good understanding of the field.

I don’t want to drag on for too long because a) video coverage of the event should be online soon and b) I had to leave after Rubel’s keynote to go to another event. Overall, Widgetcon was worth the morning and subway fare, but I don’t think a whole lot was resolved. There was a lot time spent pointing out problems, but very little spent discussing solutions. Some good foundations were laid for work in the future and there was a lot of networking so I am really looking forward to seeing what comes from the event.

Edit: There are actually a few very good blog posts from other people who went. Here are two that I really liked.

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