Social Media Now: Widget World
March 21, 2007 by Jason Chervokas
Let’s assume that the future of social media is all about widgets and places where people can put them. Let’s assume a universe where all media is distributed by users to other users through widgets that stream audio,
video, text, conversations, personal messages, everything.
We already live in a universe in which every Internet user is also a producer and often a piecemeal distributor, but now let’s assume a universe where everyone is an MSO, everyone is a Clear Channel, everyone is a Cineplex Odeon; a universe where new channels for distribution spring up quickly, spread fast, and, possibly, disappear just as suddenly.
You can see where this might be scary for big media companies which are heavily invested in distribution channels, companies like News Corp which has big money invested in satellite TV, or Time Warner which operates the nation’s biggest cable TV operator.
In this light it’s easy to understand MySpace’s attempt to cut off widgets it can’t control (which broke into the mainstream press yesterday). Sure, News Corp wants to have its hands around all revenues coming into MySpace. But maybe the company is also concerned about how widgets stand to unwind traditional media distribution channels. After all, the widget they pulled the plug on yesterday was a music player.
News Corp of course is hedging its bets, promoting it’s platform for user created widgets, Spring Widgets. But Fred Wilson followed up all the discussion about widgets yesterday with post about how many Spring
Widgets are incompatible with MySpace. Intentional? Who knows.
One new, potentially disruptive widget launched yesterday in a public beta (public beta is the new official launch). Jaxtr is an IP telephony widget that allows users to connect with other phone callers without revealing
their phone numbers. The company also offers web to phone and phone to web voice mail and text messaging as well as a service which allows widget subscribers to phone in to their widgets loading voice messages.
Sounds pretty complex to me although CEO Konstantin Guericke (co-founder of LinkedIn) showed up yesterday on Techcrunch to try to illuminate.
Jaxtr has raised an undisclosed amount of money from a passel of Silicon Valley heavy hitters led by Mayfield Fund’s Chamath Palihapitiya, former VP/GM of AOL’s Instant Messenger division and David Ladd, former Octel CTO and early pioneer of voicemail.
Jason,
A lot of this is the “information wants to be free” vs “but it belongs to Company X” debate, but enabled by widgets, which make information easily able to be free.
If users can’t put music on my My Space unless My Space has it in their container, they’re going to start to lose people to services that will allow that freedom. Yes, they may have huge traffic now. So did theGlobe.com, Tripod, and others who made their business out of allowing user content to be easily created.
More thoughts later.
You’re absolutely right, Howard. Tho’ what’s also interesting is that user-generated widgets threaten to do to Internet businesses what user generated content did to traditional media businesses….not exactly make them obsolete but launch a million micro competitors and reduce the paid income stream to all but nil.