«This year saw the emergence of a new buzzword in the digital music space -- widgets. Next year, we'll see if they do any good.
An offshoot of the global social networking trend, widgets are small applications that users can place into their blogs, profiles and Web sites, and thereby extend the functionality of an otherwise separate Web site or service. What's more, users can simply copy widgets found on friends' profiles and insert them onto their own, thus enabling a tremendously viral distribution opportunity.
The concept gained prominence in 2007, picking up momentum once Facebook opened its platform so that any developer could write an application using its user data and connections. Then Google upped the ante with its OpenSocial initiative, a standardized widget-development tool that would allow developers to write one application that can work with any social networking site adopting the technology -- which include MySpace and Bebo. ComScore, a leading Web traffic monitoring firm, even began a metrics service tracking the most popular widgets and their usage.
These widgets have opened the door to a whole new style of selling content and services online, called "distributed commerce." Simply put, rather than making customers navigate to a specific site to buy a concert ticket or a music download, widgets allow bands and their fans to sell the same from their own Web sites. If iTunes is the Wal-Mart of music, widgets are more like vending machines.»
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