MarksterBlog

I spent the weekend doing two things – 1.) trying to get my printer working properly – the heat had clogged two of the nozzles – very badly – so, from 7 AM Saturday morning up to 1 PM Sunday afternoon, I was doing a clean cycle on the printer, print out a test page (made up of pure colors of the clogged nozzles), then soaking a stip of paper towel in Windex (for the Amonia), laying it on the print platen, then parking the print head over this until the print head had sucked out a ton of ink and the heat had dried out the towel, then repeating the whole rinse – soak – dry – clean – print cycle again until Finally!! Success!! – and 2.) To kill the anxiety and time involved in this procedure (if it failed, I would have to call to a tech, which is an instant $400 cost), I was exploring the wild and whacky world of widgets.

In this exploration, I had come to the conclusion that “Widgets were the ‘Next Big Thing’”.

Why do I say this, you ask?

Because first off they are very easy to build. Technically, they are broken into three classes, the simplest class is merely an HTML page (or, more accurately, an XHTML with CSS) page laying on top of a PNG graphic for the interface!! Formatted with CSS!! Using Javascript as an interpreter.

Every web page out there is doing this right now! THERE IS NO NEW TECHNOLOGY INVOLVED HERE – It is capitalizing on existing technology in new and exciting ways – which, to me, is pretty compelling.

True, the next two levels, or classes of widgets are a little more involved, but not that much. For example, Apple, being the “most innovative company in the world (as voted by some 950 CEO’s in a report I read this morning) is working with the W3CS to extend Javascript calls to make widgets more capable on the two deeper classes of widgets – but it will still be Javascript. These new depths to Javascript will allow you to make application calls from Javascript to applications on your computer, and to be able to exploit explicit system level calls (currently UNIX calls).

But, the other thing that made me very excited was the realization that widgets are the perfect marketing tool – widgets are web pages, and being such, they are driven by the server that they are placed on – they don’t really sit on your desktop – no more than any other website does – you merely download a PNG file to shape the widget in how you want it to look to the user, a play list and an initial HTML file, which is the first content you want to display. Anything else is pulled off of your website. This is what Flash has always wanted to be but couldn’t – give you a rich experience from a web driven engine, but it is more than that – it isn’t a complex compiled thing, it is merely an HTML page sitting on a PNG image, configured by CSS and interacting with you through Javascript!. (that old closed vs open source thing again) True, you can run a Flash movie inside of your widget, just as you can run a Flash movie inside of any other kind of browser – and most of the really fancy widgets DO run Flash inside of them – how perfect.

This scheme drives traffic to your website in the most perfect way possible.

And, I learned that Vista (the OS formally known as Longhorn) was incorporating widgets, too.

Armed with this tiny smattering of knowledge, I arrived at the conclusion that Widgets are the Next Big Thing.

Finally, I go in to work this morning, read the news, as I do every morning, and lo and behold, I discover that others have come to the same conclusion – just WAY ahead of me. Widgets will be the real driving force of Yahoo from now on, and this will give Yahoo a new edge over guys like Google in exciting and unexpected ways.

I’ve already made my first widget!

Yup – widgets will be the Next Big Thing!

MJ

http://www.konfabulator.com/