network's marketing: Social Media Optimization vs. Social Media Marketing

network's marketing: Social Media Optimization vs. Social Media Marketing

If there is one thing we will be seeing a lot more of this year, it is the Web widget. You may already be familiar with desktop widgets from Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft (which calls them Gadgets). These are the tiny applications that bring in all sorts of data from the Web to your desktop (like weather, headlines, Flickr photos) without you having to open up your browser. But these tend to just clutter up your desktop until you shut them down and go back to your browser, which is open all the time anyway.
The more important kind of widgets are those that let you take data from one Website and embed them into another. Sometimes these are called Web badges or snippets, but they let you remix the Web to your liking by adding, say, a customized search box to your blog, a YouTube video to your MySpace page, or create a whole page of widgets on NetVibes by pulling in your Gmail, favorite RSS feeds, and photos from around the Web. If you use TypePad, there is a whole gallery of widgets you can add to your blog, including your linkroll or a one-click video chatting button.
The reason Web widgets are important is because they are the most concrete manifestation of something else that is happening. The Web is splintering. Centralized portals don't matter anymore in an era when Google and Digg will filter the ever-changing Web for you much more efficiently. Or you can filter it yourself with a few well-chosen widgets, and bring it to your own particular corner of the Web.
Some are already calling 2007 the -year of the widget. But ever since Websites started opening up their innards a few years ago and giving away their data through open APIs any programmer could access, the widgetization of the Web was already on its way. Now, nearly anyone can grab a widget and slap it onto their blog, NetVibes or MySpace page.
But as more mainstream Web surfers catch on to the widget craze, what will that do to the economics of the Web? What does that do to pageviews if Websites no longer control the pages where their content is viewed? As VC Fred Wilson puts it:
The big reason that 2007 will mark the end of page views is that pages are not really pages anymore. They are the delivery payload for any number of web services that load with the page.
With widgets will come ad buttons and sponsored marketing messages gussied up as content. In an attempt to break through the clutter, advertisers will be creating even more of it. Widget startups will spring up that not only disseminate information to an atomized Web, but use their widgets to gather information as well in order to recentralize and repackage it. While the center may not hold, new centers will arise from the ashes of the old.