Hacking the nature of existence

Nic Brisbourne concludes a thoughtful post "On widgets, social networks and the nature of existence": "[W]e find ourselves in a situation where internet companies might not even need their own website. A kind of virtual, virtual company if you will…."

I completely agree with Nic's sentiment at a high level. This concept of a virtualised service was what lead i-together to deploy Blog Friends within Facebook in the first place. However, the tactical view from within an early-stage startup like Blog Friends turns out to look subtly different than I expected. I left a comment on Nic's post:

Your "web brand virtualisation via open social nets" point is well taken. As you say, Blog Friends within Facebook is an example of this trend.

However, we are now building a central presence for Blog Friends beyond 3rd-party sites. To start with, we plan to deploy some key new Blog Friends features exclusively at i-together.com, over the next month or so, keeping the main feedreader service within Facebook. Then we intend to comprehensively re-architect Blog Friends around a set of APIs, which will make it relatively trivial to deploy (or for others to deploy) Blog Friends on diverse platforms and devices. (Incidentally, we didn't start off with an API-based approach back in June 2007 because we knew we had to get Blog Friends out as soon as possible to catch the Facebook adoption wave—a decision we still regard as correct.)

But why do we not feel that spreading across multiple social nets alone is an optimum strategy?

Two reasons: firstly, having our own "place" on the web gives us an air of solid independence; it safeguards us against the varying fortunes of any given 3rd-party platform (witness Facebook's fall from grace amongst the In Crowd of late). Secondly, it is *so* much quicker to implement and test features when e.g. FBML and FBJS are not involved, and those features can be a lot richer and run much faster. With our tiny development resources (three of us!), and with competition breathing down our neck, we can't afford to waste even an ounce of effort.

Presence distribution is immensely valuable as a strategy, but the current state of the web and the tech that powers it, along with startup resource limitations can necessitate some toughly pragmatic tactical choices.

Widgets and identity

The Chinwag event last night on "Media Widgetized"* was well attended by people from startups and big technology brands alike. The panel all had interesting and informed things to say, and Steve Bowbrick was a funny and effective Chair. Two good writeups of the content of the debate are here and here.

For readers who don't know what a widget is, take a look at the first writeup link above for a choice of explanations and a picture of some widgets.

My identity angle: widgets enable us to track, interact with and remix diverse information-based "stuff" (weather updates, stock prices, mini games, our social network profiles etc.) within the unifying framework of our own online personas, both public (blog, public start page etc.) and private (desktop widgets, private start page etc.).

Widgets are as much about performing our identity superpublically as they are about witnessing the world through the filter of our identity (i.e. our preferences and interests). Which is precisely why the commercial world is at once desperately keen to leverage widgets to extend the reach and resonance of their brand, and yet also petrified of their potential for disrupting and subverting that brand.

A notional example: would McDonalds want a Big Mac mini game widget placed ironically on a high-traffic blog documenting that company's role in the ongoing destruction of rainforests? I think probably not. It will be interesting to see how masters of big media marketing like McDonald ("I'm loooooving it!") cope as the web encroaches increasingly on their branding comfort zones.

One thing's for sure, though: widgets are conspiring to make the process of brand identity evolution a whole lot more fluid, transparent and predicated on authentic engagement and relationship by the brand with its community. And that has to be a good thing.

*"Widgetized" spelled with a z for search engine optimisation, seemingly—though quite why Chinwag prefer to get the attention of Americans and Australians at the expense of us Brits who are the ones likely to attend their events I'm not entirely sure!

At Chinwag tomorrow

In case any readers are going to be in the central London area tomorrow evening, I will be attending the Chinwag Live event on "Media Widgetized" and would love to see you there!

Widgets unleashed

Eric Schonfeld talks with Netvibe's Tarik Krim about the widgetisation of the web. It's an in-depth and interesting post worth reading in full.

It got me thinking about widgets and identity.

Widgets promise to allow us to take individual pieces of functionality from myriad web services and reassemble them in the manner of our chosing.

Widgets allow us to magnetise to us all the bits of the web that we resonate with, be they windows on our own information or others', re-contextualising them according to our taste. In terms of identity, widgets allow us to make our own identity primary in the way we view, interact with and re-display information: the monolithic identity of the service provider becomes a secondary context for our web experience.

The Garden Walls are dissolving and reforming. It's an ongoing process that looks set to become ever richer and more fluid.