It’s almost bibical.
Feeds(RSS) begat outliners(OPML)
Outliners begat tags
Tags began microformats
Microformats begat APIs
APIs begat widgets
Widgets begat start-ups
And the great mash up settled over the land.
Serial start-up mavens Scott Rafer and Oren Michaels have a new start-up named Mashery (guess what they do?)
Richard MacManus has a long post today on widgets. Richard writes: “I too have been tracking the growing importance of widgets, especially as it relates to the Personalized Start Pages space – Microsoft Live gadgets, Google’s modules, Netvibes and Pageflakes, and of course Yahoo’s konfabulator (although not yet integrated in a big way into MyYahoo).” and ” Nowadays it’s all about The Two-Way Web App! You can interact and ‘write’ to any number of small web services-driven apps.”
And Yahoo, of course, is supporting microformats, as the local/maps team points out.
Susan sez: Widgets could be flavor of the moment, but the ways that some widgets intersect with structured data (as opposed to intersecting with flashy, AJAX DHTML fancy effects) is one of the things I find compelling (Yes, I am fascinated by microformats, in particular).
For those less geeky than I am clearly becoming, what’s the deal here? And why should you care?
Well, for one thing, widgets (and microformats) offer the opportunity for users-and small business people, among others–to embed applications and dynamic apps into their pages/sites. If you hang around myspace, you see videoplayer widgets(think youtube), slideshow players ( rockyou) that have been cut and pasted in by users –and swickis, a eurekster product I worked on–are everywhere. So if you have content or tools, wouldn’t you want users to be able to export them? And if you have APIs, don’t you want people to build widgets with them–and then distribute those?
Viz, bibical.