How much are widgets worth?

A couple weeks ago I went to a MITX event called “Building Social Applications & Widgets for Top Platforms”. The panelists have real life experience building widgets (gadgets, badge, snippet, etc) for social networks.

Matthew Adkisson, co-founder of FreeCause.com talked a bit about building the Pink Ribbon application for Facebook. It’s a great success story, they were able to have 3M users in the first 2 months and it grew further after that. Most importantly there were able to raise money for a good cause: a rare example of widget monetization. Interestingly he said that the Facebook crowd will contribute to causes like this but they will NEVER use their credit card. They would rather donate using affiliate programs.

But not all Facebook applications are that successful. There are very few success stories on Facebook actually, but the idea of being able to reach millions of young (and a bit older) consumers is a marketer’s dream.

Some of the other panelists shared how often they talk to clients and prospects that WANT a Facebook application or their own social network. They are feeling like it’s 1999 all over again again where everybody wanted a web site. Of course, they added, we always ask “Why do you want a widget?” and a few jokes and horror stories followed.

Norris Boyd from Google Boston talked a bit about OpenSocial: it’s a great project, and new functionality is released periodically. Interestingly after he spoke it felt like all the panelists were saying

“when OpenSocial is done, we can build once and distribute anywhere to different social networks”.

The real problem with widgets, and/or other applications is that they are hard and expensive to develop for different social networks. There is very little reusability across different sites. So most companies will just develop an application for Facebook, thinking that’s where they can get the most for their development dollars. It’s almost like they are thinking “nobody has been fired for developing an application on Facebook”.

Facebook and OpenSocial were the 2 words that were used the most during this event, and that’s a bit unfortunate since there weren’t many other pearls of wisdom that were shared with the community. Facebook is not part of OpenSocial and it probably won’t be for a long time. The consensus among the panelists seemed to be a wait-and-see approach: waiting for OpenSocial (and Google) to work out all the kinks with the major social network sites. Not the conclusion that I was looking for.

Jenny, a coworker of mine, sent me this funny video on social networks the other day. It’s a must watch!