Everybody’s wacky for Widgets, and of course, Social Nets
Surprisingly enough, there were several conferences on the topics of social networks and widgets at CES. I attended the following:
- Widgets as a Platform: Content, Advertising, Communications
- Social Networks and User-Generated Media as a Technology Challenge: The Platform, the Content and the Network
- The Next Generation inf Mobile and Broadband Platforms: Social Networks, Widgets, Search, Information, Advertising and Personalization
This is very interesting to see since CES really centers more around hardware technologies than software technologies and systems. What this says to me is that everyone is really starting to wake up to the power of social nets in a big way.
I think, as social nets become a staple of online usage (much in the way the portal did even a decade ago) there will be a greater push to combine consumer electronics with these software systems. Home integration and mobile devices will become two avenues that I’m sure will see adoption of social nets in (we already are to a degree). I have on my Blackberry, for instance, the Facebook client application that allows me to readily interact, though on a rather basic level, with the Facebook’s features such as updates, messaging and photos. As more and more game consoles turn into home media centers, I’m positive well see that same sort of integration.
Then there’s “Widgets”. Widget is a some what hyped up buzz word at the moment but it represents a real trend underneath all the fluff. Widgets represent the need to stop building new, monolithic systems and, instead, leverage existing ones. This doesn’t mean that the demand for change and innovation has stopped; That will always exist. What it means is that users want to take the features they like from one site/devices/interface and use them on another. Users want portability of content and portability of function.
And so we’re beginning to see the vendors and presenters at CES pick up on these needs in the market. Users want their existing systems and content and they want them…. EVERYWHERE!
-CWD
