I’m here at the Widget Summit conference (holy cow, it’s crazy conference week – from here onto Web 2.0…), and it has been fascinating to see how far the widget industry has come since this conference last year (AKA WidgetsLive).  So much has changed in one short year, the most notable for all of us who live and breathe widgets has been the massive rise and general acceptance and knowledge of these little bite-sized bits of the web.  Exciting times!!

Within that larger widget expansion of course sits Facebook, and the f8 platform.  What Facebook did was total genius – by allowing developers to access data from Facebook’s social graph, widgets have suddenly moved from basic interactivity and personalization to true connective experiences between friends.  Clearly, beyond this smart and sticky move, the timing of f8 was ridiculously right.  Users of social networks want those networks to be the only place they have to go on the web; if they can bring the best of the web to their personal experience online, connect it up with their friends, and then go to town, those social networks truly have become that infamous "third place" (home, school, and wherever you hang out).  Pretty awesome, really. 

Of course, each of the social networks out there have the potential to be that third place for their loyal users.  This would suggest that in order to achieve that goal, those widgets or apps (as really, they all fit that definition of a bite sized chunk of the web), need to be built specifically for that platform.  In other words, that each of those networks need to open up in a same or similar manner to Facebook.

But what I’ve been thinking a lot about (and what the Widgetbox team spends a lot of time on) is what this does to the developers, and of course our developer community in particular.  Of course, those of you who are creating widgets want those to be as widely adopted as possible.  Some of you have the time, energy and resources to learn the intricacies of Facebook, and of each of the likely upcoming platform openings (rumors of MySpace, Google, Hi5 abound), but if each of these platforms do something entirely different, what does that do to your precious time, energy and resources?  We want to be here to help. 

As I know many of you know already, we recently released our Facebook App Accelerator.  We’re pretty fired up that upwards of 800 of you have turned your widgets into Facebook Apps, many with thousands of subscriptions already (some press on this here).  We’ve got some super exciting tricks up our collective sleeve to help you make these even more viral.  We firmly believe that it isn’t enough to be able to write once, publish anywhere – we want you to be able to write once, go viral anywhere.  We will do everything in our power to make this happen.

Exciting times indeed, so strap on your seat belts, sit back, and enjoy the ride!

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