Fox Interactive Media, the parent company of MySpace, will be announcing SpringWidgets (formerly titled TheSpringBox) in a few hours at the Widgets Live Conference in San Francisco. SpringWidgets is an attempt to form a centralized platform and bring together the broken pieces of widgets and gadgets.
The idea behind SpringWidgets is simple. Every company these days with some money in hand seems to find the idea of having a platform where people build things, or ‘widgets,’ around their environment, quite fascinating. Whether we’re talking about Yahoo! Widgets, Google Desktop (and their recently released Gadgets API), Microsoft Gadgets, Apple Dashboard, Netvibes, Pageflakes, Yourminis, Weebly, heck, even Opera has one. But as you can see, each has their own limitation. A Netvibes widget will only work on the web, a Dashboard widget will only work on the desktop, and so on. So why not a platform that works on everything? Meet SpringWidgets.
Whether it’s your MySpace page, blog, website, desktop, a widget developed on the SpringWidgets platform will have no limits. Using the desktop software, a user will be able to run and organize widgets from their desktop, and given they have Flash they’ll be able to see and use widges on the web. What’s more, those who have access to a blog or any place they can insert HTML codes into will be able to integrate their favourite widgets right away.
I have to admit, this is exciting stuff. The widget you see above (RSS readers click here) took me less than 2 minutes to integrate (Update: As per Don’s suggestion in the comments, I used FeedBurner’s new service for a customized version). Within the next minute I was able to download the software and have a copy of it running on my desktop as well. I haven’t seen any other app with the level of simplicity that’s visible with SpringWidgets.
Given the whole ‘widgetizing of the world’ that is making its roots, this means the average consumer (or the MySpace generation) can now join the party with the arrival of SpringWidgets. And what’s the best thing about it? Unlike MySpace, which is what we don’t want the web to go in the direction of (in terms of design and use), SpringWidgets is really the perfect product to be rooting for.
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[tags]SpringWidgets, Fox Interactive, Widgets[/tags]
