Graeme Thickins on Tech

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

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

October 16, 2007 / / 1 Comment

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: Personal Home Pages Panel

October 15, 2007 / / 1 Comment

Just after lunch, there was a session to review the current state of widgets on personalized home pages. It was moderated by Jeremy Liew, a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. The first panelist to speak, Jessica Ewing, is Google’s product manager for the iGoogle start page, and calls her widgets "gadgets."  She said users want two things when it comes to start pages: personal connections and speed. Perspagespanel
She said studies show users won’t spend more than about 100 seconds to personalize their start page. One way Google helps here is to quickly populate a gadget on a particular topic — say, astronomy — with popular sites that other users have tagged on the topic. Their "World Cup" gadget was one of their most successful to date. Her advice to gadget makers: "Create things that people are excited about and be really efficient" with space and content.

Netvibes CEO Tariq Krim spoke about his firm’s new, standardized, open platform to allow you to distribute your content.  AOL’s Frank Gruber said his firm has introduced the "myAOL Personalization Suite."  Pageflakes’ CEO Dan Cohen said his firm is focused on the needs of mainstream users. "They don’t understand things like RSS and widgets."  He said Pageflakes is "basically a collection of widgets — that’s what we do." Running out of time, he said to be sure we saw a demo of his "Web Site Clipper" at the Pageflakes table later. In the follow-on discussion, Netvibes’ Krim seconded iGoogle’s assertion that personalization comes hard for many people. "They don’t know what they want."  They also don’t realize yet that they can widgetize virtually anthing — videos, web sites, etc. iGoogle’s Ewing said that maybe half its users are neophytes, even first-time web users. AOL’s Gruber said that widgets will increasingly be created around events  or other things in the context of a short timeframe, such as Major League Baseball’s playoffs. But iGoogle’s Ewing recommended that such sort-term widgets have a life of "several weeks." Pageflakes’ Cohen commented that he estimated the four companies on the panel had about 80 million personal home pages combined. Both iGoogle and AOL said they report their widgets’ stats publicly. Pageflakes’ Cohen emphasized that page views is not the metric to use. "You must understand the purpose of the widget to measure it. There’s no one-size-fits-all metric."

Widget Summit, Day 1: MyBlogLog’s Founder

October 15, 2007 / / 1 Comment

Eric Marcoullier is the founder of MyBlogLog (acquired by Yahoo). He didn’t start it as a widget company — it kind of morphed into that after a year or so, with the now famous "Recent Readers" widget (see mine to the right).  P1030551
The company launched very simply in March of 2005, just to look at the outbound links of a site.  It was purely a stat service at that time and, after a year, some 14K blogs were using it.  Then Scott Rafer asked them to consider the aggregate value of all the data they were gathering, and, voila, Scott was CEO within a month, Eric said. Skip forward, and it’s now M&A history….

Eric left Yahoo a couple of months ago, and I would expect we’ll be hearing about him starting something new in the not too distant future. (The rest of the MyBlogLog team remains in place at Yahoo, he told me later.)

Eric gave us some of his personal views towards the end of his talk (he was careful to state these are not Yahoo’s views), and one of the most interesting is to be clear that "widgets are not free advertising."  He said that many companies, advertisers, etc, see widgets and think, "Wow, how do I get some of that?"  Eric says that’s the wrong way to think. "People are dying to syndicate your content if (1) you don’t take users away from their site, and (2) you can do it for free."  The key, he said, is to widgetize your content. He raised an interesting question: "If iTunes would have had a widget years ago, would Last.fm even have had any success?"  Another point Eric really emphasized: "As you pursue your widget strategy, think about how you’re going to promote your widget."

Widget Summit, Day 1: Max Levchin Speaks

October 15, 2007 / / 0 Comments

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

Widget Summit, Day 1: A Lot’s Changed in a Year

October 15, 2007 / / 0 Comments

Niall Kennedy kicked off his second annual event by telling us that we’d be hearing 33 speakers and some 27 hours of programming (!) over the next two days. Totaling up all the breakouts, I guess. He talked about the Vista Sidebar, now out 9 months, for which there’s already 1500 widgets….and about Mac OS Leopard (rumored to be coming Oct 26), which will have a button in the browser now to create a widget for you (and he noted the Mac OS is up to 3200 desktop widgets now after two years). Widgetsummit1
He said Leopard will have a brand-new widget IDE that "will make things a lot easier" and a desktop widget that will "grab stuff on the web for you, so you see it in shrunken form." He noted that, in line with Newsweek declaring 2006 the "Year of the Widget," there’s really been a proliferation of widgets on personal home pages, in blog sidebars, and in social networks.

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