Fiidgets Blog

Widget conferences

August 30th, 2007 General financial widget 2 Comments

So far I have found two conferences dedicated to widgets.

Name WidgetCon Widget Summit
Venue 2007: New York 2007: San Francisco
Date 2007: July 11 2007: October 15-16

Popularity: 8% [?]

Are widgets useless or overrated?

July 16th, 2007 General financial widget No Comments

According to Valleywag, widgets are useless or overrated? Below is my comments on the reasons given:

  • A violation of blog principles.
    I would disagree with this reason. How a widget is being used is depending on the user. The widget developer cannot force the user to use the widget in a predetermined way. The freedom of mix and match is the strength(weakness depending on your viewpoint) of widget.
  • A sluggish page is a bad page.
    In my opinion, users and developers of widget should view widget as graphics. Too many widgets on a page makes the page cluttered. If most of your visitors are from US and most of your widgets are hosted in US, I think 5 to 6 is the maximum number of widgets per page. Otherwise three widgets per page is the general guideline. You may also move the ’slow’ widget to the bottom of a page as most modern browsers support progressive rendering.
  • Statistics.
    I would agree with this point.
  • Business model.
    The issue of monetization is not a unique problem for widget developer. In fact most free web 2.0 sites have similar issue. For now, the developer can use widget for marketing/publicity purposes for other products/services.
  • Hype.
    At the moment, noise to usefulness ratio for widget is quite high. This is not unusual. Widget is in similar position to blog a few years ago. Do you have an idea for widget related finance? You can write down your idea in the comment section of post. You can also get some ideas from This Week’s Top 25 Hottest Facebook Apps

Popularity: 9% [?]

What is a widget?

June 22nd, 2007 General financial widget No Comments

Widget is a piece of code or software that can be integrated with/plugged into the widget platform easily to provide extra function(s). Of course it is not surprising software can be extended. However the main advantage of widget is ease of integration. Currently there is two main categories of widgets : desktop widget and web widget. Technically most of web widgets are developed using Javascript or embedded browser plugins. You can find examples of web widget at Widgetbox.

Do you have a blog or website? Want to enhance your site or attract more traffic? Consider these finance widgets

Popularity: 14% [?]