Widgets

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Easy come, easy go: Sprout “sunsets” its consumer widget service

I am seriously conflicted about how to feel about Sprout‘s decision to “sunset” its consumer widget-building software-as-a-service tool, Sprout Builder.

By “sunset,” of course, Sprout means “kill.” For a startup, they’ve certainly learned the corporate art of doubletalk.

I’ve been raving about Sprout Builder since its debut. Before Sprout Builder, dynamic, multimedia widgets were a costly undertaking requiring programming expertise. Sprout Builder made it drop-dead easy for anybody to create one and deploy it. I got myself a free account and created two for my podcast, For Immediate Release. Fans of the show were able to copy the embed code and add the widget to their own sites where any visitor could click the “play” button and hear the latest episode. All I ever had to do was log in after posting each episode and update the link to the podcast MP3 file.

Creating the widget was a simple drag-and-drop exercise, thanks to the AJAX-enabled website. The process went like this:

• Create a box to contain the widget, setting the size I wanted.
• Upload the graphics I want to use, pretty much the same way you upload a video to YouTube.
• Drag the graphics into the box.
• Drag an audio player from among the various assets Sprout Builder provides into the box.
• Link the audio player to the online location of the podcast MP3 file.
• Save.
• Publish.
• Copy the embed code and put it on the FIR site and my own blog so others can get the code for their own sites.
• (The service also let you create multiple tabs for a widget, link to video and do all manner of other very cool things.)

One version of the FIR widget was for websites. It’s a bit wider than the one I created specifically as an app for Facebook. I’ve also recommended the service to more than a few people and suggested to Dominic Jones that it would make it simple for companies to provide updated investor information.

I whined a bit when Sprout decided to start charging for the service, but opted to pay the lowest fee since these were the only two widgets I planned to create. (The fee ratchted up based on the number of widgets you wanted to maintain.) I felt I had little choice since the widgets already existed on other people’s sites.

I don’t have any idea how many people have added the widget to their sites, but I’ve seen it in at least a couple dozen places.

Then came word a few days ago that Sprout was abandoning—er, sunsetting—the service, opting to focus solely on its enterprise solution, which runs $2,999 per year. The email from Sprout CEO Carnet Williams begins:

One of the toughest decisions that a start-up faces is where to focus its efforts and resources. Sprout Builder was our first product and has always been near and dear to our hearts. More importantly, we value the customers who have gotten us to where we are today. However, we have made the hard decision to shut down the Sprout Builder subscription service to focus on our enterprise product lines.

So, on March 14, all those widgets fans and friends of FIR have put on their websites will vanish.

I said I was conflicted by Sprout’s move. On the one hand, I’m sympathetic to the fact that businesses need to make business decisions. And I certainly understand that the same outcome would have occurred had the company run out of money or if it had been acquired by another organization that wanted Sprout’s assets and talent, but not its service.

On the other hand, the company sought customers who built widgets that have been deployed to many other sites. All of us are left high and dry. Depending on what shows up where the widget is supposed to appear on those sites, we could all wind up being the target of some anger (or, at least, some eye rolling). More to the point, if I offer something like this in the future, who’s going to trust me? My credibility will suffer because Sprout didn’t keep its implicit promise to its customers.

Sprout also seems not to have opted for any actions to minimize the impact. They haven’t offerd to open-source the code for Sprout Builder. They haven’t pointed customers to an alternative. And if they tried to sell the service to somebody else, they haven’t said so.

I’ve tried finding a comparable service. Whoever staffs Widgetbox’s Twitter account provided half an answer to a question I posed, but never answered my follow-up question, even when I sent the query a second time.

Ultimately, then, I’m frustrated. I’m frustrated by the situation, the inability to find an alternative, the requirement to put the word out to bloggers and site managers who are hosting the widget, and the fact that I’m aggravated even as I recognize Sprout’s right to manage its business.

Is my aggravation justified? And if you ran Sprout, how would you have handled a decision like this?

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Death Watch: Feeds are important, but widgets still work

Twitter and Facebook’s rising popularity have altered the online habits of more than a few people. Given the volume of information that comes our way through the tweets and status updates of those we follow, many are now convinced that the news finds us.

Certainly I discover a lot of interesting news by way of shortened URLs embedded in tweets, and the recent use of Twitter to direct Central Texans to the site of a hospital treating victims of the Fort Hood shootings exemplifies the ways Twitter increasingly is being used as a news delivery vehicle. But given the speed with which tweets fly by, I’m bound to miss a lot of news if I’m not watching my monitor at just the right time. To get a comprehensive overview of the news in which I’m interested, I still need other channels.

These other channels include widgets, which continue to thrive despite a growing chorus insisting that the web widget is dead.

The argument for the demise of the widget is best articulated by Socialvibe president Joe Marchese, writing on MediaPost. Marchese writes,

What marketers need to understand is that the feed killed the widget. Feeds, like Facebook’s news feed and Twitters status update, have made the portability of content nearly irrelevant.

The web, in Marchese’s view, is a world of people “programming content for friends, co-workers and total strangers,” one in which a destination (like a website) is increasingly irrelevant. A marketer’s goal, he says, is to get people to program your branded content into the information they’re feeding to others via their tweets and Facebook status updates.

I agree with Marchese—to a point. But, does this mean the widget is dead? Hardly. In fact, with startups like Sprout building entire businesses around widgets, building and maintaining high-quality widgets has become easier and cheaper than ever. The only question seems to be whether anybody will ever again visit a web page where these widgets are housed.

If you buy into Marchese’s assertion that the feed has killed the widget, then you believe that traffic to destination websites is trending to zero. There’s no question that unique visits to destination sites—even those that historically have done the best job of attracting traffic (think Nike, for instance)—are declining. But the loss of thousands—even tens of thousands—of visitors still leaves sites with thousands—even hundreds of thousands—who still drop by. As attention shifts from static sites to the real-time web, some attention will continue to focus on sites. (If the widget is dead, then isn’t on-site advertising dead, too? Don’t tell sites like TechCrunch or any of the top mommy bloggers, who seem to be getting enough page views to be profitable with advertising.)

Traffic to traditional sites is declining, not disappearing. There will always be reasons to visit a destination website even as most of our attention shifts to content produced through social channels.

Consider tweets that contain a shortened URL. That URLs takes you somewhere, often to a blog post or a news story. That content appears on a web page, and on that page you can find all kinds of other material that may serendipitously reveal even more content in which you were interested. After all, the blog’s theme guided the blogger to write the post that motivated someone to include it in a tweet, so why shouldn’t the material that orbits the blog’s posts—including widgets—be equally interesting?

Marchese’s post also assumes that widgets contain only the kind of content that is now communicated via tweets and status updates. A widget I created contains an audio player that, when activated, presents the latest episode of For Immediate Release, the podcast I produce twice weekly with Neville Hobson. So you click a shortened URL in a tweet, follow it to a web page to read the recommended post, and while you’re there you see this intriguing widget with an audio player. Curious, you click the play button and are introduced to FIR. Many of our listeners have shared FIR with people visiting their blogs by embedding the widget on their sites.

Widgets can also contain video, images, contests, fundraising activity (the American Red Cross has made excellent use of fundraising widgets during times of natural disasters), polls, and all manner of other content. They can serve a variety of purposes, like the fundraising/CSR widget below (feel free to embed it on your site):

It doesn’t even take a shortened URL to bring someone to a web page. Despite the fact that there are multiple channels through which our community can listen to FIR, our statistics tell us that most people use the Flash media player directly from the FIR website. Why not provide additional communication-related resources for them to look at while they’re there? Knowing that people do visit our site gives us the ability to provide them with more relevant and useful content they can serendipitously discover—and maybe even embed on their own sites. Then there’s the Twitter widget, letting people who visit your site know about your Twitter activity and, possibly, resulting in the addition of one more follower.

And then there’s Facebook, where many people go to read their feeds. Services like Sprout make it as easy to create and deploy a widget for Facebook as one for a standard web page.

Marchese is right about the trend toward feeds, but there’s a vast difference between disruption and destruction. There’s no doubt that newspapers are in decline, but more than half a million people still subscribe to The Washington Post, and the Post has the fifth largest subscriber base in the U.S. With millions and millions of people still reading paper newspapers, it makes no sense to abandon them as a means of getting your story out. With hundreds of millions of people still viewing websites, it makes no sense to abandon them, either, as a channel for reaching people.

Ultimately, widgets work. They’ve been widely adopted and they have tremendous reach, according to ComScore numbers analyzed by Terra USA Research:

It’s worth pointing to the widely reported decline in traffic to Twitter; use of the site dropped 27.8% from September to October, according to Nielsen, leaving the service with 18.9 million unique visitors. While many of those are influencers, it’s still a fraction of the total online population. Widgets can still prove useful in reaching the rest, whether they’re reading blogs, websites, or Facebook.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that much of the buzz around widgets has to do with the nascent market for interactive TV widgets and widgets on mobile phones.

And it’s more than a little ironic that Marchese’s post proclaiming the death of the widget was accompanied by two common blog widgets—a “related articles” widget and a “most read” widget.

Are you using web widgets and, if so, do you continue to derive benefit from them?

Monday, April 21, 2008

WebShare weekend: Britannica initiative gets boost from TechCrunch

What a weekend.

It started quietly enough. I’ve been working with my client, Encyclopaedia Britannica, to prepare for the hard launch of its WebShare program, set for next Monday with the distribution of the official press release (to be accompanied, of course, by a social media version).

Tom Panelas, the director of Corporate Communications at Britannica, brought me in to help promote WebShare, which has two distinct purposes:

• Give free Britannica accounts to bloggers and other web publishers so they can use the site in their research, cite Britannica articles and provide selective access to Britannica through links in their posts to Britannica articles and widgets.
• Provide readers of these articles with access to Britannica articles without needing an account at all.

The program includes a variety of elements that strengthen the venerable encyclopedia’s first significant foray into the social media space. In addition to the linking program, there’s a blog, a Twitter account (to include a link of the day), widgets and “topic clusters,” collections of links to Britannica articles that relate to a current news story. For example, we put together a list of links that would be useful to anybody covering the Delta-Northwest airline merger the day that story broke.

Leading up to the launch, we’ve been quietly alerting people to the availability of the WebShare website and giving out some free accounts. Anybody visiting the site could register for a free account, as well. The primary targets of our outreach effort (Neville Hobson is helping me out with this) have been (and will continue to be) education-focused bloggers, library bloggers, and journalists. Many who live and work in these disciplines are restricted, right or wrong, from citing Wikipedia articles in their work, which led us to believe they would constitute a very interested group.

Some popular bloggers were also on my list, and on Friday evening, I went ahead and sent off a note to the first of these to Mike Arrington at TechCrunch. Mike reported on WebShare almost immediately, including some criticisms, and attracting over 100 comments (as of this writing). But positive or negative, Mike’s post opened the floodgates. Stories suddenly appeared in Mashable, C|Net, and some other top-flight blogs, as well as blogs written by librarians we had not yet contacted and scads of others. So far, 156 posts have been written about WebShare that link to the site; Technorati has assigned the site an authority of 80 and a rank of 110,846. Not bad for a site that had no links to it at all on Friday afternoon.

I’ve been archiving significant articles addressing the program on del.icio.us.

Tom and the folks at Britannica were prepared. They have received well over 1,000 registrations so far, and have been handling them all quickly. It’s a manual process, since each registration needs to be approved. We also put in work upfront to identify the inevitable criticisms Britannica would face:

• Britannica, with its 56,000 articles, can’t compete with Wikipedia, with over 100 million.
• Britannica’s business model is obsolete. The company must ultimately move to a wiki-based, open-source model.
• Despite the entry into social media, Britannica is still a one-way resource, not engaged in the conversation.
• WebShare is really just about getting lots of link love to boost Britannica’s visibility on Google.

The folks at Britannica are ready for these, and will be using the blog on the WebShare site to address these issues. The company’s president, Jorge Cauz, will be doing interviews with some bloggers, as well. It’s also nice that some comments—and some posts—take issue with these arguments and applaud Britannica’s efforts. (I was delighted to see my friend Brian Solis lauding the program, even though he had no idea I was working on it). And Tom has been jumping in as well, participating in some of the comment threads. (Tom, I’m sure, is exercising some restraint to avoid correcting people who are just wrong, like the one blogger who said that the company uses the old spelling of encyclopaedia in order to “sound more authoritative.” In fact, that’s been the spelling of the company’s name since it was founded in 1768.)

Meanwhile, I’ve spent much of my weekend identifying new posts and making recommendations about which ones should be addressed by a comment and which by a follow-up post on the Britannica site. A few follow-up posts will appear over the next few days.

A couple of key observations come out of the weekend experience:

• The A-listers count. Regardless of how much people say they trust friends, family members, and participants in their networks, people like Mike Arrington can still create a huge amount of awareness and generate a lot of buzz.
• It makes sense for companies to start small with initiatives in mind, but it pays to get the first bits right before moving on to others.
• If you’re going to do social media, do it. Rather than simply roll out the linking program, Britannica was very agreeable to adding dimensions of participation to the mix, including the blog and the Twitter account. This provides a platform for listening to feedback and participating in a conversation about the initiative, and maybe even tweaking it where it makes sense.

I’ll be back with more on the WebShare program as it rolls along.

Thursday, March 13, 2008

Sprout moves to public beta

If you need proof that widgets are popular with both publishers and viewers, take a look at Sprout, a Web app that lets you create sophisticated widgets with ease. (The widget that plays the latest episode of For Immediate Release, over on the right-hand side of this blog and wherever you, dear reader, choose to put it using the “share” code, took about 10 minutes to create using Sprout.) According to an email I received from the Sprout team, the private beta led 5,000 people to create 17,000 widgets that have been viewed by 11 million people.

Concurrent with the release of an upgrade to the application that responds to input from private beta users, Sprout has opened its doors and now is in public beta. It’s definitely worth your time to try out the service (particularly since it’s still free). More improvements are due in a month, including animations. The team also promises a way to remove the Sprout bar, the horizontal graphic attached to every widget that identifies it as a Sprout object. I suspect that’ll be part of a fee-based service, like getting Eudora email without the ads.

Saturday, February 02, 2008

Get the FIR widget!

I found a new service called Sprout that allows you to build a widget that plays multimedia, among a lot of other things. It’s remarkably easy to use, as I found out when I managed to get into the beta. It took about 10 minutes to build this widget, which plays the most current episode of FIR. As each episode is posted, I’ll just go into the widget builder and update the media link so it always plays the most recent episode. Just copy the embed code (click “share”) and visitors to your site or blog can listen to FIR directly from your page. Pretty cool, huh?

 

Wednesday, August 01, 2007

Widgets go mainstream

There was little agreement when, at the New Communications Forum in February, I declared 2007 "the year of the widget" (although it was covered in a few places, like here and here). Bryan Person figured I might be on to something when he reported on the first conference dedicated to widgets, WidgetCon, held last month in New York.

But surfing through TV channels last night, I saw the definitive proof that widgets have arrived.

Burned out from staring at the computer monitor all day, I took a half hour to kick back on the couch and relax. Nothing I usually like to watch was on, so I settled for Discovery Channel's recurring event, Shark Week. I sat up when I saw a crawl on the bottom of the screen letting viewers know they could get the Shark Week widget.

The widget includes three shark-related headlines (updated to stay current), links to a couple Shark Week online features ("Ask a Conservationist" and a feature that lets you assemble your own shark documentary, along the lines of the misguided Chevy Tahoe experiment but without the risk), a link to the Shark Week site, and a link that lets you add the widget to your own blog or website.

The widget is huge, as widgets go, expanding to fill whatever space is available, which may discourage some shark fantatics from adding it to their sites. Still, a Technorati search revealed 423 blogs specifically about sharks. I'd be willing to bet the widget has found its way onto some of those sites, among others. In any case, it's a sign -- to me, at least -- that widgets can be a relatively cheap way to get your content out onto the edge where your target audiences will be likely to see it.

Here's the widget (I got it to fit in a narrow width by putting it in a one-cell table):

Friday, April 20, 2007

Snap Shots: mouseover widgets

I tried Snap.com on this blog for a week or so and asked readers to give me feedback. I got one comment supporting the tool; all the rest hated it. They didn’t just dislike it or prefer my blog without it. They loathed it.

So I was skeptical when I read that Snap.com had introduced SnapShots, which turns links into widgets. They still work with mouseovers, but an icon indicates that a mouseover is available, making them easy to avoid. (The regular Snap.com feature produced a pop-up whenever you moused over any link, which is what drove people crazy.)

SnapShots provides live data from a website, which means you can consume anything from a YouTube video to a stock chart from directly within the pop-up. Since you can indicate that a pop-up is available—and restrict their use to only those links you want, rather than have every link pop up a window—it seems to be a far more useful feature.

There are eight SnapShot modules available right now, with more added regularly—one was just recently introduced that offers Reuters company news articles that delivers Reuters content about your publicly traded company. Others include summaries of Wikipedia entries (sort of an on-demand glossary), stock charts, YouTube videos, photo albums, Amazon.com product listings, and MP3 files.

Here are two examples, one of a a Youtube video showing one of the prototypes from the recently launched Coca-Cola Virtual Thirst desighn competition, the other a Wikipedia definition of “podcasting.”

Some additional coverage of Snapshots is here.