Widgety Goodness Highlights

What a great conference Widgety Goodness was. Congrats to Ivan for pulling it off, from idea to hundreds of people showing up in six weeks or something.

It was good, really good. I got to spend a day with the concepts and details of widgets. I had the sortof skeleton of an idea of what the whole widget thing was about, and then spent the day really adding flesh and ideas to that ever so slippery widget concept.

And some neat and interesting ideas have come out of it all too. Here’s a few of my highlights and thoughts:

Physical Widgets

Russell Davies helped fill in my Amazon wish list with a couple of real-world widgets. Real physical things that talk to the internet and physically exist in the real world.

Firstly, the Wattson which is a sexy-looking real-world implementation of the Viridian Energy Meter proposed by Bruce Sterling in a design competition in, gee, about 2000. This idea here is that if you can see your energy consumption via something sitting on the kitchen table, you might just go and turn off some more lights and appliances on standby. I want one of these.

And I’m still deeply intrigued by the Nabaztag WiFi bunny.

Platforms

There was a lot of talk about widget building, distribution and management platforms. All good stuff. I think some of the vendors did a bit much spruiking their own stuff rather than addressing the big questions, but you get that. It was good the the full lifecycle was represented, and I was delighted to see a lot of talk about metrics around widget usage rather than simply downloads, placements and impressions. This is getting towards the behaviour-based or participation-based metrics we are starting to get out of our scouta media recommendation platform.

Distributed Rights

Great to get into a discussion about content ownership among microsites and widgets. Who owns the data you put in a comment field? I hope we can get something together to come up with a simple way to represent terms and rights next to every input box. A litle rainbow of colours or something. Thanks to Kris from js-kit for originating that discussion.

Freshness and humility

These days, I value more and more the people that are brave and real enough to accept and talk about their mistakes and what they don’t know:

• Google can’t be as cool as their speakers always say they are. Sorry, but I just don’t buy the perfection. It just seems arrogant and unreal.
• If you are a widget platform vendor, I’m happy enough for you to tell me once that you have the best platform. But please don’t do that for half an hour. Move on. Tell me what you are worried about, or confused about. I want to find the human becoming in what you are doing.
• Will McInnes filled the room with fresh Oxygen with his presentation about Nixon-McInnes evolution into a social media agency. I like the humility, I like the experiment. And thanks for the name-check Will!

Just being there

Gee conferences are marvelous things (though the afterparty++ hangover wasn’t). Just getting out there and sharing. Wow. In the day I threw a couple of new ideas out there, worked a couple more through with people during drinks, and chatted probably complete nonsense well into Friday morning.

The value and power of getting together face to face to share and work on stuff is remarkable. Nice one, Ivan.