Blog – Page 14 – Niall Kennedy

Widgets Live! timeline

I received a few e-mails this morning from people interested in how Widgets Live! came together. Yep, the event really was planned in about a month, from site selection to the actual day-long event. In this post I’ll outline how Widgets Live! grew from an idea to an in-person event.

July 12

Coming up short on ideas for my weekly podcast with Om Malik, I suggested we talk about widgets and how they are changing web publishing. I had been playing around with widgets as a form of web feed syndication, specifically thinking of performance on Live.com and other views into a central syndication back-end. I saw a bit of this distribution at Technorati as out content placed on lots of small sites (tag links, favorites, mini etc.) helped distribute incoming sources of traffic and make the data users care about more portable.

July 15

I published some thoughts on the Widgetization of the Web to accompany the podcast.

September 11

Om publishes an article on widgets as the subject of his first Business 2.0 column. The article includes conversations with some of the new startups focused on widgets.

September 18

Dare Obasanjo is a bit frustrated with the conference scene and wishes he had somewhere to go to talk about micro applications like widgets.

Over dinner Om and I talk about Dare’s post, conferences, and the hotness of the widgets topic.

Later that night Om posted to his side blog contemplating an “informal event to talk widgets.”

Last week of September

Deciding whether or not we wanted to invest the time and effort needed to make the conference a success.

First week of October

Decided November 6 would be the ideal date for the conference to allow people in town for the Web 2.0 Summit to extend their stay and release product before the onslaught of press releases issued at the bigger conference. Next up came finding a venue and other early implementation details needed to announce the event.

October 10

WidgetsLive.com is launched and the event announced on my blog. Ticket sales begin and sponsors solidify their interest. We wanted to announce before the video search panel Om and I were moderating that evening in Mountain View.

October 12

Om announces the event on GigaOM. I had posted a rough schedule to the conference website by this point and started filling in speakers.

November 1

The conference is sold out!

November 6

The conference kicks off at 8 a.m. with over 200 attendees in attendance.

There was about a 4-month gap between talking about doing a podcast on something I’d been slacking on writing up for a while to hosting a conference bringing together major players in the industry. An initial attempt at lazy blogging became a lot of work in the end, but it was fun. Ha!

Widgets Live! wrap-up

Yesterday’s Widgets Live! conference was a success! Over 200 people involved in the widget ecosystem came together to discuss the current state of the industry, show off their work, meet new people, and learn new things. There were two big takeaways for attendees: we’re just getting started and the widget world is a bit too fractured.

Highlights from the day

Arlo Rose talked about getting a call from a friend at Apple after a meeting discussion “steamrolling” his product and small company, Konfabulator. Apple later released Dashboard.
Fox Interactive Media launched Spring Widgets, a new desktop and web-based widget hybrid. I wrote about SpringBox last month, trying to track down lots of information about the team and its history. It was fun to finally meet all of them at the conference.
Alex Russell talked about creating the right user experience within your widget using existing best practices.
Tariq Krim showed off support for Google Universal Gadgets inside Netvibes personal homepages.
NVIDIA acquired PortalPlayer in the morning, making our hardware widgets session a bit more interesting.
Freewebs announced Mooglets will be released under a MIT license, creating new possibilities for enterprise deployments and more.

The start of something big

Most speakers and attendees agreed the industry is just getting started, and tackling some of the big problems that have held back user growth and adoption. The main audience of widgets has no idea how to author a web page, and are more interested in displaying their name in glitter or pictures of cute puppies than their stock portfolio. MySpace is a major deployment platform and has created many accessory companies. The new Spring Widgets will be deployed on the websites of Fox television stations, showing the weather, traffic, and upcoming TV shows for your local area. It’s populist yet focused content located alongside where you already consume that information in other mediums.

The creation and uses of widgets has surprised even their creators. Adam Sah of Google noticed nurses were using an allowable blood loss calculator on their homepage and Meebo has seen their chat widget Meebo Me used as a homework helper between parents, students, and teachers on assignment websites. Release, observe, rev.

Differences of naming, markup

Widgets, gadgets, modules, startlets, page components, web badges, and “stuff” were the talk of the show. The divergent naming choices of deployment endpoints is a hint at the current disconnect and incompatibility of the various widget systems and their respective containers. Developers need to create widgets for each specific system, wrapping their content in the appropriate manifest file or tying into the special JavaScript functionality of one system or the other.

In some cases custom development is a good thing, such as using Quartz rendering on a Mac or Windows Presentation Foundation on a PC to help your widget match the look and feel of its environment. Each widget system differs in its manifest and communication with other widgets on the page, or data communicated by the platform.

Connecting the industry

The most rewarding aspect of the conference for me was connecting major players from across the industry. The 9-hour intensive challenged perceptions of what users and developers want from widget content and end point and shared the experience of people involved in the widget space daily. A few people I spoke with mentioned how discussions at the conference changed their strategy, so hopefully we’ll now see cool developments a bit faster and more on target than before.

I moderated the homepage widgets panel, but the conversations between session participants Google, Microsoft, and Netvibes didn’t end on stage. After our session all three leaders of their respective products continued comparing notes in the break room and exchanged contact information. Success! That’s exactly what I had in mind and in a single moment the effort of putting on a conference seemed worth it.

Parakey: A new startup by Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt

The latest issue of IEEE Spectrum features Blake Ross on the cover and a few details about his new startup Parakey cofounded with Joe Hewitt. The desktop application is described as a personal organization, editing, and sharing application. It’s designed to make the life easier for less technical users who would like to save, modify, and share information without too much hassle. (via Matt Mullenweg)

Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt have worked together in the past on the Firefox browser, breaking away from the application suite that was Mozilla Seamonkey and blazing a new path. At first there were mixed reviews and feedback about a stand-alone browser but the success of Firefox and its community has eclipsed the previous suite and its current components of Thunderbird, Sunbird and ChatZilla.

I think it’s very cool Blake unveiled his new company in IEEE, a professional association for engineers, instead of a tech blog. The four-page format in the magazine lends itself well to telling a more complete story behind the company and the motivations of its founders even if there are a couple inaccuracies within regarding open source and business profitability. Given the extremely hot brand of the phoenix that is Firefox it will be a challenge for Blake, Joe, and others to stay focused on building the product instead of fielding premature inquiries.

Parakey is a publishing platform which lives on your desktop and connects seamlessly to the web for both permissioned and global sharing. The founders hope to create more publishers with easy to use tools and permissioning options. Data lives on your desktop but you can open up and share it with the world if you choose. The software can connect to local hardware such as a digital camera to retrieve and edit photos before storing locally or on a server. The article does not discuss a business plan but I imagine a certain level of service (storage, bandwidth) will be available for free with increased allocations available for a price. The app will have basic options likely aimed at a market sweet spot but enable extensibility through a programming language named JUL (similar in name to Mozilla’s XUL but likely different in markup).

Parakey supposedly received seed funding from Doug Leone of Sequoia Capital in early 2005.

Widgets Live! conference is sold out!

The Widgets Live! conference sold its last ticket this morning, filling the room next Monday with 200 people interested in the current state of the widget ecosystem and what’s next. We have a good mix of people in attendance, representing large content publishers, investors, designers, and even some hardware manufacturers. It should be a lot of fun. Below is some more information about Widgets Live! attendees.

The conference website had visitors from all over the world and is a pretty good correlation to conference attendees. We’ll have companies present from Europe, India, the Middle East, Asia, Australia, and the United States.

Attendees by sector of interest

What form of widgets interests you the most?

We asked attendees to identify the widget platform of greatest interest. 51% of respondents were most interested in blogs and social networking, 17% in personalized homepages, and 15% in desktop widget opportunities.

Attendees by job function

What best describes your job function?

We asked attendees to identify their job function. Product and development areas are equally represented at about 36% each, and 9% of the respondents identified themselves as designers.

Widget strategies

Do you or your company currently have a widget strategy?
Widgets Live attendee widget strategy

Thirty-percent of respondents did not already have a widget strategy and are attending Widgets Live! to learn more about the area. Everyone will learn a lot more about possibilities beyond their current understanding of widgets.

Summary

Guessing the number of attendees and limiting your venue options appropriately was loosely informed and mainly pulled out of thin air but it worked out well. If you’re attending the conference, see you on Monday, and if not you’ll definitely hear some of the news being announced at the conference from other attendees.

Google collaborative appliance on the way?

Google’s moves into application bundles and collaboration software are setting it up for a bigger enterprise play, taking on Microsoft in an area that consistently feeds their R&D. Maybe you read about the JotSpot acquisition this morning on the Google enterprise blog.

We look forward to putting those wikis to work.

Google currently searches the enterprise through its search appliance, a brightly colored box you place in your rack and configure to crawl behind the firewall. Just one application on this box seems like a waste of space and could perhaps open up some more applications for small to medium sized businesses.

Google Apps for Your Domain currently bundles Gmail, Talk, Calendar, and Page Creator for a specific group of users, all hosted on Google’s server. Stick it in the box.

I expect the new version of Blogger, Google Docs, and JotBox will eventually be integrated into the Google appliance. Google Groups to manage your work groups, Google Desktop to add to the local index what the appliance might have missed, and a special version of Toolbar to tie it all together.

A quick browse through Google job openings leads me to an Engineering Manager/Director for CRM although that could just be internal.

Just a theory on the progression of Google Apps bundles but it looks like the pieces are falling in place. Failure to compete in this area means Microsoft maintains a large percentage of the enterprise search business through Sharepoint and other offerings, funding more research and blocking Google from being the preferred search provider of enterprise knowledge.

Bookmarking and social sharing trends

The ability to save a URL has been around since Mosaic 0.2 but is currently experiencing a transformation as we learn more about the pages and content behind the pointers and share our findings with others through social networks. Hotlists, bookmarks, and favorites are changing and this month’s SF Tech Sessions next Monday will take a look at a few new companies changing the way we think about sharing bookmarks.

The inspiration for this month’s SF Tech Sessions came out of a conversation with Jeff Weiner and Joshua Schachter of Yahoo! earlier this month. We talked about different ways people share data on del.icio.us, Yahoo! My Web, and Yahoo! Shopping as well as within smaller communities of interest.

The bookmarking space continues to change, driven by changes in desktop software as well as modern web usage such as bookmarklets, extensions, and social sharing, but it’s clear we’re just getting started. Let’s take a look at current methods of bookmarking a web page, and how individuals choose to share personal and social browsing behavior.

Local bookmarks

Local bookmarks are stored in our web browser profiles and are often used the same way we might dog-ear a book. Local bookmarks can list a frequently visited site, an article you want to be sure to revisit later, or a decision in progress such as choosing a vacation or shopping for a new couch.

You might bookmark the news page of your son’s school to stay up-to-date on snow closures, events, and other relevant news. Local bookmarks might be relevant only to you, enabling shortcuts for frequent activities.

Further reading: Internet Explorer Favorites, Mozilla Firefox.

Live bookmarks

Some bookmarks contain trackable updated content, expressed as a web feed, calendar data, or simply a file modification. It’s possible to subscribe to a web page, displaying updated content within the bookmark listings or simply noting the page has changed in some way.

A live bookmark lets users quickly glance over changing data, and track the updates of many sites at once. In this case a bookmark is more like a subscription, creating a shortcut for visiting a page, identifying new content, and then visiting the location of the new content.

Bookmark clusters

Adding a bookmark used to mean saving the location of the current browser window. Today’s modern browsers consist of multiple tabs, placing multiple web pages inside each window. These tabs might be organized collections, storing items you would like to recall on a regular basis or save as a collection.

Browser tabs form natural groupings and an easily saved state. I expect we’ll see more bookmark collections in the future as tabs become common browsing tools in Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Opera. A user can save a group of bookmarks such as a trip planning, home improvement, or baby names.

Synchronized bookmarks

Bookmarks were one of the first pieces of local data to travel into the cloud, offering synchronization across multiple computers or web access when you are on the go. Synchronization may occur through a browser toolbar or plugin, operating behind-the-scenes while connecting to a backend such as Yahoo! or Google.

Google and Yahoo! account for more than 95% of toolbar searches in the U.S. and I expect many of those users automatically sync their bookmark data.

Bookmarking in public

Sites such as del.icio.us or Furl allow you to sync and share your bookmarks, exposing your web pages of interest to other site members or the entire Web. Your descriptive behavior may change as you add a title, description, and tag for your own use and/or discoverability of others.

The integration of social bookmarking content in blog sidebars, spliced feeds, and site browsing has made bookmarking a substitute for a full blog post and commentary. Private bookmarks are a fairly recent addition to del.icio.us, showing the default nature of the site’s users.

Bookmarking for another individual

Del.icio.us users can share a bookmark with a specific person, placing the pointer within the target person’s bookmark stream. This bookmarking behavior is a virtual tap on the shoulder, suggesting new content of potential interest.

A person’s link behavior might be tied into a user account network, tracking the bookmarks of a group of people at once, and suggesting those same people as possible share points.

Bookmarking for an affinity group

Groups form in online communities, joining together people interested in squared circles, social networking or web design. Submitting links to a group creates a shared resource with a defined audience interest. Your work is archived, allowing new members to discover the group’s past activity.

Bookmark groups may also launch further conversation, either in real-time through a chat or through comments on the original submission. Adding a link to a new article in a trade publication might spark some debate, or a link to a corporate document might initiate further analysis.

Try it: Ma.gnolia, Mugshot

Shared collections

Shared bookmark collections are a useful way of sharing research and soliciting input from others on multiple resources. Users can share their own personal resources such as the best coffee in San Francisco, waterfall hikes in Oregon, or the hottest prom dresses of the season.

Once a collection is shared it might be edited or commented upon by a group, enabling the wisdom of the crowd. Shared collections are an opportunity for revenue sharing, rewarding the recommendations and expert opinions of others while completing a purchase of displaying an advertisement.

Check out: Amazon Guides, Kaboodle.

Additional data collection and display

A bookmarked URL can contain more information than just a URL text string. You can identify a bookmarked resource as an image, audio, or video and display the full content or a preview within your application. You can also recognize content from known structured sources such as Amazon, Flickr, and YouTube, pulling in additional data about the linked resource.

Recognizing an Amazon URL and the ASIN within, a service could gather price, availability, product images, reviews, and more from the web page HTML or through available APIs. A Flickr or YouTube URL could be similarly recognized and additional data gathered and URL normalized based on the service’s proprietary identifier and URL structures. I expect more social bookmarking services will build these specialized data displays as they seek to grow vertically and make their pages a bit less boring.

Frequently visited non bookmarks

You might frequently visit a site by typing some keywords into a search engine and clicking on the top result. I sometimes conduct the same search for a resource multiple times a month, visiting the top result. I consider these actions a type of soft bookmark. It’s easier to initiate a search than save it, but my repeat visits are useful information to the search engine as it tries to shape personal search and social search preferences.

The example search above shows a search for “NSI whois” on Google, my way of calling up a Whois data for a domain and I occasionally want to get the data within a few seconds.

Bookmark search

Bookmarks are searchable locally and inside of an online service, contributing strong signals about user preferences to the search process. A search for “digital camera” becomes more useful when you are reminded about previously bookmarked cameras. Search can serve as a recall for yourself and a filter for yourself and others, creating better results out of the millions of possible matches to your query. Your friend’s guide to waterfall hikes is more valuable to you than a random publisher, and search engines with bookmarking abilities will continue to integrate your saved items, visited results, and more into your personalized search results.

Summary

There are many different approaches to bookmarking and recent changes in web browsers, add-ons, and a web of participation will continue to fuel growth in the sector. There’s still a lot of work to be done in terms of search and service integration and creating compelling reasons to generate useful content, connecting users with the information they care about.

If you made it this far and you live in the San Francisco Bay area you might want to check out SF Tech Sessions next Monday, October 30, from 7-9 p.m. at CNET to learn more from the people behind current social bookmarking products.

Google Alerts for blog content

Google Alerts now supports blog search content. If you subscribe to a Google News alert for your brand or topic of interest you can now receive the same style alerts for content in the Google Blog Search index.

Google Alerts tracks news, blogs, Usenet groups, and Google Groups discussions using the same search syntax found on their respective website. The new blog search e-mail notification will be an easy extension of vertical search for existing users. Advanced users can setup an advanced search, or choose to receive general updates via web feeds and critical updates via e-mail. I expect Google will add Google Talk integration soon, delivering alerts over IM.

Disclosure: I own a small piece of Technorati, a competitor to Google Blog Search.

Planning a small conference

I like small, focused events especially in the early days of an industry. Om and I organized the Widgets Live! conference to bring together the major players creating widgets, gadgets, and modules and the major endpoints of deployment. Many decisions were made along the way, and I’ll share just a few in this post.

When?

We knew lots of people from around the web industry would be in San Francisco for O’Reilly Media’s Web 2.0 conference November 7-9. Scheduling the widgets conference adjacent to the Web 2.0 conference creates a convenient opportunity for a few people to extend their visit to San Francisco from France, Ireland, Japan, Seattle, and many places in between.

Hosting a conference the day before the Web 2.0 conference allows smaller companies and products to launch at our widgets-specific conference before the downpour of press releases and announcements that usually happen at the bigger conferences.

Rough schedule

What products and companies do we want to be sure are represented at the conference? Om and I listed some of the different widget sectors (desktop, social network, homepage, etc) and the key players we would like to see represented from each sector.

How many attendees?

The speakers and their coworkers created a base attendee level, and we knew more people would like to hear them speak and meet the other people in the room. But how many? We guessed there would be a total attendance of between 150-200 people. The total number of attendees limits available venues and rooms available to host the group so I rather sell out the available space and have a more intimate setting than restrict available rooms to something like a big ballroom.

Room configuration

Conferences are typically setup with either a theater or classroom seating arrangement. A theater arrangement consists of rows of chairs facing the stage. A classroom arrangement adds tables to each row, allowing attendees to place a laptop or notepad on a flat surface. I like the classroom setup a lot better, and restricted venue searches to rooms that can hold 150-200 people in this configuration with either 18″ or 30″ tables for laptops and notepads.

I hate crappy WiFi

There’s nothing like crappy WiFi to ruin an otherwise good conference. It allows attendees to stay connected with their office colleagues, write e-mails, post to a blog, and connect with other attendees. The widgets conference needed to have working WiFi access for all the laptop-toting attendees, but would networks at possible event venues be able to handle the load? Could I trust the sales person who assures me they can?

Fixed wireless access might help solve the issue, beaming microwaves of bandwidth from the hills of San Francisco. If the event venue has line-of-sight to a point of presense there may be hope. Two big towers in San Francisco are Sutro Tower on Twin Peaks and the Clay-Jones building on Nob Hill.

Picking the venue

We ended up choosing a locally owned and operated non-profit as our event venue. The Marines’ Memorial Club provides discounted accommodations to visiting military personnel and recently renovated their event space. I like the high ceilings, vintage look, and a small venue for a small, focused conference.

The event rooms on the 10th floor also happen to have a great view of the Clay-Jones building just a few blocks away on the top of Nob Hill. TowerStream happens to have a point of presence on Nob Hill, boosting available bandwidth at least 10-fold.

Separating speakers and sponsors

I wanted to select the best possible speakers regardless of their company’s sponsorship role. I handled speaker selection for the conference and Om handles sponsors. This separation of duties is attempt to balance the best possible attendee experience with a good level of sponsor participation.

We rented an additional room to provide exhibit space for sponsors and allow attendees to interact with the products and staff talked about at the conference. Maybe you’ve never seen Windows Vista or a tricked out MySpace page, or you want a hands-on experience with some widget hardware. Setting up a physical space of focused interaction creates a better experience for both sponsors and attendees.

I think sponsors get a better value at a focused event, setting more focused objectives and getting their name and product in front of the appropriate community. I can reevaluate the perceived ROI in about two weeks.

Summary

Conferences are a lot of work, but I hope to see more small events in the future. There are definitely expediencies learned with experience and I’m open to sharing implementation details with anyone thinking of doing their own event.

Conference industry basics

I’ve been busy over the past few weeks organizing the Widgets Live! conference. I’ve talked to lots of people interested in various aspects of the conference industry, so I’ll summarize a few logistics in this post.

Venue costs

Event venues typically charge a room rental fee combined with a minimum catering expense. All prices quoted are usually a “list price” and negotiable depending on factors such as the length of the conference, number of rooms booked at the hotel, your total catering spend, and your repeat business if you host multiple conferences a year. Many venues will waive the room rental fees based on a catering minimum, so be sure to ask.

Catering

Catering fees in no way match what you might expect to pay at a sandwich shop or local restaurant. In my experience looking at San Francisco hotel catering menus a continental breakfast consisting of coffee, orange juice, muffins might cost around $25 a person. You’ll have to add a service charge (typically around 20%) and sales tax to quoted prices. The sample listing in the picture amounts to $13 for each cup of coffee and about $80 for a dozen petite donuts.

You can get a gallon of Starbucks coffee, about 12 cups, for about $13 and a dozen Krispy Kreme donuts for about $6, but you’re paying for the atmosphere and the service environment during your important event.

Audio-visual

You’ll need microphones, a mixer, speakers, a projector, and a projection surface for the event. Many venues partner with an outside audio-visual consultant and you can rent equipment and perhaps even hire a technician to make sure all the equipment runs smoothly during the event.

Typical projectors available are either SVGA (800 × 600) or XGA (1024 × 768). More lumens means a brighter picture, which can make a big difference in a room with a lot of sunlight.

WiFi

Typically WiFi is provided as an a la carte item for conference organizers. You will most likely have access to a T1, which in theory could handle synchronous 1.536 Mbit/s I’ve typically seen T1 data access listed as “up to 50 users” by venue sales staff.

A hotel might host a breakfast meeting for the local investors club, a wedding, and occasionally a technology conference. The network is typically not setup to handle the thrashing of a tech conference crowd.

You can boost your bandwidth through the hotel if they are setup for extra capacity, or you could drop in a fixed point microwave connection if you have line-of-sight to a fixed wireless provider.

Summary

The first steps for a successful event are securing a good date, location, venue, room setup, and nourishment of the food, bandwidth, and power varieties. I’ll address some of the decisions we made for the Widgets Live! conference in a separate post.

New Googlebot controls for webmasters

Google Webmaster tools crawl rate request

Google has added new features to its tools for webmasters, allowing us to request Google index our site faster and more thoroughly than before. Crank it up!

Control Googlebot crawl rate

You can now control how frequently Googlebot crawls your site over the next 90 days. Webmasters can ask Googlebot to slow down or speed up for the next 90 days. Your choice may affect your total bandwidth usage but the tradeoff is possibly more frequent visits from Google’s discovery and indexing tools.

Enhanced image search

Webmasters can now opt-in to Google enhanced image search. If you opt-in Google may use tools such as Google Image Labeler to add keywords to associate your images with crowdsourced keywords.

Summary

I’m a big fan of Google Webmaster Tools to maintain a better relationship with what can be my biggest source of referrals. The new tweaks from Google allow Google to learn more about my site and possibly send a few more referrals my way using current and experimental methods. Not everyone uses Google’s Webmaster Tools, so I feel like I have a bit of an edge, however artificial that hope may be.