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. 
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.
Tag: Newsweek
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). 
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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