Reflections & analysis about innovation, technology, startups, investing, healthcare, and more .... with a focus on Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes. Blogging continuously since 2005.

Tag: Facebook (Page 3 of 4)

Widget Summit, Day 2: Geeky But Oh-So-Widgety Good

At 7:30 am on Tuesday, I was back at the squeaky-clean-new UCSF Mission Bay campus, chompin’ at the bit for more of that good widget scoop. Along with Monday’s program, this would surely be more widget smarts than a person could get anywhere else on the planet — at least this week. Tuesday’s session was to have a different purpose:  producer Niall Kennedy had planned it that way [and hats off to him for a great job putting this event together!]. Monday was about the business of widgets and large trends affecting the industry, while he told us Tuesday was for getting into the nitty-gritty, helping attendees plan their widget implementations. And there was no question in my mind that most of the 200+ attendees at Widget Summit 2007 were in fact developers — or, as Niall described them in the conference materials, the people "directly involved in this hyper-growth industry, providing the tools and content that connect people and their ideas across the web."

On this day, I would take deep dives for you, oh valued readers, in Javascript widget basics, advanced Javascript. Microsoft’s Popfly and Silverlight, Facebook development, iPhone widget development, and — last but certainly not least — Google Gadgets.

Dori Smith, a well known programmer and author of Javascript books (published by O’Reilly and others), led the first session. She told us how the term "widget" isn’t really well defined — it means different things to different people. Dorismith
In the Apple world, for example, there’s the "widget object," while in the Vista world, there’s the "system.gadget" object — but they’re different things.  She also called the industry on the "write once, run anywhere" claim — calling it a myth. "Unless it’s something really, really basic," she said, "you’re going to have to tweak the widget for different platforms."

So, what should your considerations be when creating your first widget? Dori set out a great list:
• what do you want to do?
• is it community-oriented and viral? or maybe just something simple, like a countdown to an event?
• is is static or dynamic?
• will it require frequent updates?
• is it for a web page or not?
• what platform will you use?
• what does your audience want?

Dori said cross-platform woes can be best dealt with by separating content from style and behavior: HTML for content, CSS for style.  She recommended you start by making your widget work without Javascript, then add JS functionality without touching the HTML. She said DOM (Document Object Model) lets you manipulate with Javascript without affecting the HTML.

The biggest complaint about widgets is that they’re slow, Dori said. The solution?  "Better written widgets!" Let the page finish loading, she said, adding that there’s a simple workaround to this problem. (Presumably, you have to read one of her books.)

What’s Dori’s crystal ball?  First, she’s really looking forward to Leopard coming out on October 26.  She’s seen a lot of the new stuff coming in this OS upgrade, but can’t talk about it.  One thing she could mention: "Dashcode" — a development environment for widgets. "I love this product!"  Audience question:  "But is it only for Mac OS dashboard widgets?"  Dori’s answer: "Yes, but you can create graphics you can use on other platforms."  She also really likes the new "WebClips feature of the new Leopard OS.  "It allows people with no interest in code to make their own widgets."

Programmers are increasingly understanding the impact of widgets, Dori said. "And users are more willing to install widgets."  She warned, however: "Platform incompatibilities will get worse before they get better…The standardization process will help," she said, "but it will take a long time."

Since this was a session on Javascript, what about that other kind of widget?  "Could you comment on Flash?" asked an audience member. "There are lots of people out there with iPhones," she said, "which don’t support Flash!"  The questioner countered: "But Javascript doesn’t work on MySpace."  Dori countered back: "Yes, but you can use DHTML. It really depends on what you want to do."  Flash is much more visual, she allowed, but it’s also an expensive product to buy.  And the final good insight from Dori: "Anything you can do in Flash you can do in Javascript — on one platform.  The problem comes with multiple platforms."

But, as if this session wasn’t enough on JS, there was more coming. Joe Smarr, the young, animated chief architect at Plaxo, jumped right up on the stage to continue the fun.  [Joe is the son of famed computer scientist Larry Smarr.]  Plaxo, Joe reminded us, was doing Ajax iframes in 2004. It now has 20 million users. "Why is JS special?" Joe asked. Joesmarr
"Because you’re downloading real source code and running it in the browser," he said. And downloading and running JS blocks the browser, and the UI thread. "Code from different domains is executing together," Smarr said. "You can do a lot of good with Javascript, but you can do a lot of harm, too."

The biggest piece of advice from Joe: "Make your widget NOT slow the page down — or open any security holes. Make it fast."  He also put in a plug for Firebug (a Firefox plug-in for coders): "It’s the web hacker’s best friend. Makes it really hard to keep developing in IE."  Joe gave us his secrets for high-performace widgets:

• write less code

• draw HTML efficiently

• yield early and often

• profile like crazy

He had this opinion as well: "innerHTML is way faster than DOM manipulation." On the subject of best practices in Javascript, Joe stressed, "Give your functions unique names! You’re in a shared namespace. Otherwise, you can clash with others." For security, he said, "use JSON and callbacks for third-party API calls." For more info, Joe said to check out his blog — two specific posts to look for there have "OScon" in the title. He’s also pointed to a video of him presenting on this same topic at OScon. An audience question: "What about multiple widgets on the same page?" Joe’s answer: "You have to worry about those widgets fighting each other. Each one should have its own ID….And don’t assume too much about the host environment."

More to come later from me — one more post, wrapping up the rest of Tuesday’s program.

Widget Summit, Day 1 Finale: Facebook Developers Panel

It was a full day of panels and speakers, but it almost seemed to fly by. Lots of content! But it sure as hell held my attention. The last panel of Day 1, as it turned out, was the first chance to focus on The Big FB — the elephant in the room, shall we say? We didn’t get to hear yet from anyone at the company itself (that would come the next day), but we did from three very well known external developers of Facebook apps: one big company (eBay) and two smaller/startup firms (Renkoo and Openhive).

Renkoo’s success with its "Boozemail" app was accidental, said CTO Joyce Park. Her company first thought its functionality was too sophisticated for Facebook. But they decided to give it a try and reasoned there was a common interest out there in one big thing — drinking!  Boozemail
They had modest expectations for their app, but, in a litle more than three months, it’s been used — are you ready? — 120,000,00 times.  Now, Park said, her firm is even looking to "export it everywhere" — meaning, beyond Facebook(?). Yes, as you might imagine, they’re developing "branded drink icons" for the liquor industry (for use only by people aged 21 and above, of course).  One problem, though: the liquor companies don’t like the word "booze," so the implication was that, wherever else the app may be used, it may have a different name.  Park also showed a brand-new app Renkoo was introducing at Widget Summit: "HaikuZoo," which is an app for sharing virtual pets. Yes, friends, you can even buy decorations for your pets’ profiles.  Is this a great country, or what?

Rolf Skyberg of eBay jumped in next — the guy with the best darn title at the whole place: "Disruptive Innovator."  Rolf talked about his firm’s ‘eBay To Go’ Facebook app, which lets you personalize your Facebook profile with something you want to share that’s on eBay; he said "we’re now calling this one a widget." Ebaytogo
He also talked about ‘eBay Marketplace’ — an app that displays what I’m looking for (interested in buying), what I’m selling, and who my friends are on Facebook.

"Widgets are part of our strategy to put eBay where the people
are," said Skyberg. He noted that his firm is now publishing APIs, and
even paying people to develop apps. That appears to be the case with a new one Rolf mentioned, called Giftbay.Ebaymarketplace

The remaining panel member was Ryo Chijiiwa, CEO of Openhive, who
was a late add. He showed an app that lets people share their book
collections. He said he launched it within a week of the Facebook
Platform launch. But he said it wasn’t viral enough — for three
reasons. The app wasn’t inherently social, it lacked lightweight
features, and it was too complicated.  So, I’ll be damned if I know why
he was on the panel if this was the case — but he talked so softly I
couldn’t understand a thing he said from this point on. So, you figure it
out. I couldn’t even find his app on Facebook. Maybe it
self-destructed? …dying that oh-so-painful death of (hush) non-virality.

Naill Kennedy started asking followup questions: "Joyce, yours isn’t the only drinking app on Facebook — what’s your differentiation?" To which the CTO of Renkoo responded: "I think maybe Happy Hour (another app) went overboard with virality. They force you to spam a lot of your friends." How are eBay’s apps different? "We’re looking for people who are active on both sites," said Skyberg. "There’s lots of ‘stuff’ that defines people."

Moderator Kennedy: "Are you worried about brand dilution on Facebook?" (a reference to the many eBay-related third-party apps there now)  "Most of the the apps now are about search," said Skyberg. "We wanted to add things that will really bring the two communities together."

In the audience questions later, someone asked about commerce apps. "I don’t think there are many good apps on Facebook for that," said Renkoo’s Park. "I mean, isn’t it kind of creepy to buy your friends’ stuff?"  Yeah, I guess how do you ask for a refund if it isn’t as-advertised… But the best audience question of them ALL was the last one: "Have you thought about cross-integration of your apps?  For example, can you send booze to your virtual pets?"  To which Rekoo’s Park, seemingly missing the humor, answered: "No, that disturbed people."  Making it sound like they actually did consider it… 🙂

In a brief session following, three new companies/services gave quick pitches:  WebWag did a cool demo of its Widget-On-Demand feature, grabbing a stock section off the MarketWatch site (GOOG, of course) and creating a widget of it for his home page — in about five seconds. Gydget creates cool fan widgets — great for bands, sports teams, and the like (here’s some coverage). And NetVibes, a sponsor of the event, announced it now supports more widget platforms (including iPhone), so your can write your NetVibes widgets once and run them everywhere. Graemenetvibes
They also let you localize for different languages. Their new widget for Facebook is pretty cool, too — I put it on my NetVibes start page. (Right side of creenshot.) NetVibes was sponsoring the reception, which we were all now ready to bolt for….

UPDATE (10/17, 7:40 am Pacific): To add link to story about Gydget.

UDATE (10/17, 3:25 pm Pacific): To add more content.

Widget Summit, Day 1: How Do We Measure ‘Em?

Ian Kennedy, product manager for MyBlogLog at Yahoo, was a great moderator for this panel on how to do audience measurement of widgets. The writeup of this session tantalized us with talk of new “engagement metrics” — though little new was revealed, despite the moderator’s atempts to drag something out of the panelists. Widgetmeasurement1
We did learn, however, from Jeff Gillis, that Google will drop us a piece of news on us Tuesday via his analytics blog — he said 12 pm, and that would appear to mean noon, since nothing’s there yet.

Hooman Radfar, founder of Clearspring, kicked things off with a commercial about his widget platform and distribution service. He said more than 75 brands are now using it, and “thousands of developers.”  He also said his is the only company that provides real-time metrics. Clearspring’s original engine was built with RockYou, said Radfar, “which is the largest widget provider in the world.”  He said a new metric Clearspring has is “placement,” so you can track the sites where your widget is appearing. Looking forward, Radfar said his firm will be at Launchpad in November to introduce its new “open platform.”

Introduced next was Eyal Magen, founder of Gigya, who said his widget distribution network is used by 7 of the top 10 widget sites, and that it’s only a “30-minute integration.” He said what’s new from his firm are “Widget Usage Reports.” Widgetmeasurementpanel

Google Analytics’ Jeff Gillis followed with his hint-hint, wink-wink, that he’d have news on his blog on Tuesday. (He couldn’t have dropped the news on us on Monday? The team must be working all night….) He said we could sign up for the beta with a secret code, only for attendees. (Yeah right — ask me if you want it.)

Moderator Kennedy popped the big question at this point, “What do each of you have for measuring interactions within a widget?” Stunned silence. Gillis rambled about how Urchin Tracker measures “15 dimensions.”  But what about interaction within the widget, Kennedy repeated, “like tracking which specific buttons users are clicking on.”  No, Gillis said, they’re not able to do that.  Clearspring’s Radfar saw an entry here to say “we have ‘interaction analytics’ coming out.” No word of when. He said they “won’t be dependent on Flash.” He also admitted there are other things as well that aren’t being measured yet, including “viral spread and most popular,” among others.

Are there any best practices yet, asked Kennedy, regarding placement of a widget on a site?  After all, “there’s a whole science of where best placement is in other media” — certainly for print, to name one. Google’s Gillis said it’s too early, but eye-travel studies (the so-called heat map) show an “F” pattern, which would suggest left-side placement as best. Gigya’s Magen said something to suggest that top placement might be good. Clearspring’s Radfar commented to just “keep it simple….people have a tendency to cram a whole web site in a widget.”  He also stressed a key point: that advertisers expect different metrics than publishers. Gillis said it’s “user-specific metrics” that many want.

“Where will we be in a year?” asked moderator Kennedy. “Will we have a definition of ‘engagement metrics’?” Google’s Gillis: “The term can mean many different things to different web sites.” Radfar: “A big issue will be how are you going to collect data in a non-intrusive way?”  Moderator Ian Kennedy closed the panel with a take of his own: “People will want to measure direct revenue and indirect revenue.”  Ah, the elusive monetization.  More on that later.

UPDATE (10/16, 10:30 am Pacific):  This just in, as promised — the latest Google Analytics news.  Now I know why they held it till today….there’s an eMetrics event in Washington, DC, where they’re making this multi-part announcement.

 

Widget Summit, Day 1: Max Levchin Speaks

The well-known founder of widget leader Slide (and formerly a cofounder and CTO of PayPal), Max Levchin is the closest thing there is today to a rockstar in the nascent world of widgets. Slide had 134M uniques in June according to comScore. P1030545
He noted that Slide has three of the top four apps on Facebook: TopFriends, FunWall, and SuperPoke.  Gee, check out all the things you can do to your friends on that last one!  Max said Slide is now working a lot on monetization, and doing well (movie promos, etc). Most people would agree that Slide seems to be mostly about "MySpacing" Facebook. But, that may not be a bad thing — because, with its numbers, it’s likely to be the widget company that most quickly figures out how to make money in this game, working with the advertisers that will be the main route to that $$ –and they already are very much talking to them, running lots of trial campaigns to prove their worth.  Other than that, I didn’t understand a whole lot of what Max said….he talks really, really fast.P1030546

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