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Google Trying to Goose Widget Ecosystem

Posted by: Heather Green on June 28

This is interesting, via John Battelle. Google has created a new pilot program offering dough to folks who build popular gagdets, Google’s name for widgets. Gadgets are Google’s fastest growing products, according to a recent Washington Post story. Google is offering grants and seed investments, in which case it will take a stake in the venture making the gadget.
No surprise, right? Of any company that gets the distributed world that is widgets, it’s Google.

There seem to me to be a few ways to play the widget game. One is to be a platform where people plop down their gadgets, like Facebook has shown so beautifully. Another is to be a distributor of those gadgets (and the ads that go with them) as they are flung across the Web. Either way, there is an ability to control some part of the ad sales. What, though, about folks who simply make the gadgets or the content or services that are widgetized? That’s where I am trying to figure out how much value there is.

A quick look at the most popular Google gadgets shows a very popular Wikipedia gadget, a driving directions gadget and a sticky notes widget.

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Reader Comments

Gourmet

June 29, 2007 07:02 AM

>dough to folks who build popular gagdets

there is a mistake. It's written gagdets, but gadgets is correct.

Mike Reardon

June 30, 2007 12:52 AM

Like your local garage bands a widget creator now needs a manager and agent and a label to distribute their work. That's Google and Yahoo they are that label in this, they need created content to involve our attention and to sell ads on, right! With recent history of return on media content for Sony and Universal artists sold into the market as a gauge, you can look at getting about 15% of the use paid for by those that use your widgets. Maybe less like 1.5% of your mashup's or widgets will gain a fair return. Local garage band! but your widgets get play and are intellectual property so have your manager and agent think a little Metallica in getting your widgets forward copy write protection.

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In Blogspotting Senior Writer Stephen Baker and Associate Editor Heather Green take a look at how cutting-edge technologies are changing business and society. Whether its blogs or wikis, data crunching or data targeting, technology’s advances are reshaping the world that we live in.

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