We attended, networked, listened and learnt… Brighton hosted the first ever European Widget Conference yesterday and what a show it was. We walked, talked and generally digested these new fangled things called Widgets and afterwards no one could be in any doubt about what they are, what they do and what they mean to us in this brave new online world.
There were a range of speakers from around the globe providing insight into widget creation, delivery, analytics and SEO. The conference was mainly focused on widget tools, platforms and commercial applications – all highly techie stuff. If you attended, you can now officially consider yourself to be fully widgetised.
By the end of the day we all felt thoroughly informed and inspired. Highlights from the show included the cool presentation by blogger extraordinaire Russell Davies, loaded with lots of fun but interesting stuff and of course our very own Will McInnes including an amusing observation on the Corn Exchange loos.
So thanks to Ivan and Emm and the whole team who organised this event we loved it, roll on next year!
3 Comments
Hi I was the widgety goodness conference last week and had a great time. I was really impressed with the local Brighton widget/social media industry that was going on.
Will’s Corn Exchange image was a nice ice-breaker for his presentation btw.
One of the things that the conference didn’t touch on in great deal was getting users to adopt widgets/gadgets/applications. How do you create a viral effect? How do you get people (outside the industry) to download widgets to their desk tops? An application I worked on which is really funny is the Office ASBO (you ASBO annoying people at work):
http://apps.facebook.com/officeasbo. It’s a great little application but how do you get noticed when you are competing against 6,000 – 7,000 other apps on facebook?
I personally think that all those apps on Facebook have a very limited shelf-life.
It only took like 2 weeks for me to get thoroughly bored with constant requests to “be a vampire”
I think that Facebook Apps that are actually of some real use could have real value. But there are so many crappy toys and pointless time wasting things on there that i’ts a bit difficult to see what has use and what doesn’t. I just tend to deny all invitations to apps on Facebook.
@ Ben S
Thanks Ben. Glad you enjoyed the day, but especially pleased that you were impressed with what we’ve got going on down here in Brighton – that’s cool.
In terms of how you get noticed, I think you need to really focus in on two things: who is it for; and how entertaining or useful is it for those people?
I think it’s absolutely the future of widgets and apps to have lots of little niche widgets suitable for narrowly-defined niche audiences. Then the number of people that download it or interact with it becomes irrelevant – it’s how much the small targeted audience like it.
In golf they say ‘driving is for show, putting is for dough’ and they mean that hitting the ball a long way is all very well, but actually what matters is successfully getting the ball into the hole. I think this transfers well to the web: ‘I got 20,000 installs of my ‘throw a sheep’ app doesn’t really speak to me. People like Ash, me and the rest of the world are quickly tiring of that. What is more powerful is ’67% of Independent Financial Advisers installed our mortgage rate widget’.
That’s my current thinking.