Flash widgets are taking over the world

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Flash widgets are taking over the worldI think all of us knew that Flash widgets were popular but Richard’s post of Read/WriteWeb blew me away. He’s reporting that Slide, a media widget company, announced that they are distributing more than a million new flash widgets every day. I’m a big fan of widgets done in Flash and I think the explosion of popularity shows that there’s a real marketplace here.

I think this is also a glimpse of what’s to come. People love being expressive and they love taking their own content and building rich, interactive experiences around it. Companies like Slide have made a business out of that. They do things like let people create animated slideshows, guestbooks which support video, and photo albums that you can add flare to. None of this is possible without Flash and people obviously love adding those mini-rich-experiences to their blogs/MySpace page/Facebook.

But it won’t stop with widgets. Eventually people are going to be drawn to very immersive rich experiences on a larger scale. Widgets do a great job of abstracting that and giving users some ownership, but as the bar gets higher and higher, people will expect more interactivity when they use the web. This has implications for web applications as well as web portals. A better, more rich experience will become a differentiator and that’s one of the value adds behind RIAs.
[tags]Slide, Flash, widgets[/tags]

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  • http://blog.ewherrmann.com ewH

    The beauty of flash widgets is that they won’t be limited to the browser. The same widget can be used on the desktop with AIR (yourminis) and they will eventually be able to be deployed to hopefully a wide range of mobile devices.

    This will be a huge step for enterprise adoption of widgets. It will allow people to do their work the way it works best for them.

    Cheers,
    ewH

  • http://www.clevr.com/ Matt

    At CleVR, we love Flash widgets! So much, in fact, that we’ve based our business around them. Flash Player 9 was the turning point: stuff like BitmapData and DisplacementMapFilter were the things that made me realise that it was finally possible to do a proper panorama viewer in Flash that was more than a flat sliding image. So we dumped Java applets and haven’t looked back. Then when Apollo came along, I realised that it would be possible for us to even move our photo stitcher over to Flash. We’d dismissed the idea of doing serious image processing in Flash before, as it seemed like an absurd idea, but writing the viewer made me consider again. So we’re in the process of dumping Java Web Start, and our new version is an AIR app. Thanks Adobe for all this cool stuff that lets us do cool stuff! (Yes, I realise I’m starting to sound like a fanboy now)

  • http://www.aroundgreece.com Alex

    I think that when these start becoming more available for mobile phone use, then they will really take off. I have several widgets that I use daily, and if we can soon use them on our mobile devices, then that would be excellent.

  • http://www.limotycoon.com limos

    How can possibly release a million widgets every day?
    Is that possible?

  • http://flanture.blogspot.com Flanture

    here is another free flash widget: bookshelf widget which will save you some space on your blog

    http://flanture.blogspot.com/2007/11/free-flash-bookshelf-widget.html

    I agree that things are not gonna stop with widgets, but I think that RIA’s will change the way we see web in more ways than we can imagine right now.

  • http://www.ipotekasite.ru/ vito

    >How can possibly release a million widgets every day?
    >Is that possible?
    He’s reporting that Slide, a media widget company, announced that they are distributing more than a million new flash widgets every day.
    Keyword is distributing. Nice article.

  • http://www..cupargardencentre.co.uk Alexander Rose

    I have to agree with you, flash widgets are taking over the world, along with Apple, Google and Windows, in generations to come I hate to think how lazy we will become as human beings. Flanture (the comment above) has a great site full of flash widgets and is great example of how displaying how much flash widgets, amongst other technological advances, are taking over our lives. Personally I prefer to sit outside in the sun all day…with my laptop! Keep up the good work with the blog, great read.