Widgets, Widgets Everywhere

Widgets, those mini-software applications, that you can download and embed on web pages, are on a tear, and most of them are coming from third-party developers. Some examples are applications such as iLike, Bunchball Games and Picnik. Forbes recently highlighted the explosive growth of widgets in this recent article. To illustrate this growth, Forbes cites the story of Facebook, which opened its platform to third party developers in May of 2007 and now has nearly 13,000 widgets available that have been downloaded 765 million times.

Most widget developers hope to profit through an advertising model, but as the article points out, only a very few of the estimated 100,000 companies or individuals worldwide that develop widgets will show a substantial profit for their efforts. A co-founder of the widget development company, RockYou!, said some developers are pulling in as much as $80,000 a month in advertising income.

When companies such as Facebook open their platforms it can mean their customers get access to a lot of useful or fun applications, but it can also cause problems. Recently, Facebook had to ban a Secret Crush widget from Zango after it was discovered the company was distributing adware to unsuspecting Facebook users. Unfortunately, there had already been one million downloads of the application.

With all the widgets available for so many platforms and from such a huge number of developers, there will no doubt be some other problems that pop up like Zango. However, most of what is available out there is safe and can either add functionality to a website or simply serve to make things a little more fun and interesting.