I have been in the computer industry long enough to know that the one one thing we are certain to see is constant change. This can be quite exciting as it is an industry where you always have an answer to the generic "what is new?" question posed by people who do not follow closely the industry and its latest developments.
So it is interesting to see how technology changes travel from the central core of a development team out to the outside "world" of the user community. It seems that the rate of acceptance and distribution is directly proportional to "I Got It Factor" . The "I Got it Factor" will someday be a mathematical formula that easily used in the distant future, but until now more cruder tools will have to be applied. The main point is that there seems to be a point where enough of the populace understands and accepts an idea, concept, thought, product, discovery to the point it can be easily related to other people. Part of this view can be distorted if you participate within specific groups that understand particular concepts and jargon. So pointing my fingers at myself .. I have to like so many people lift up out of the special pool to the "outside" in order to check if a concept has a high "I got it factor".
Case in point is an interesting concept... Widgets. This can turn to be a long discussion. However for this discussion I will concentrate on one service provided by http://www.widgetbox.com/
So For fun I Blidgeted this blog.
What is the focus and point of this blog?
Well essentially you have to tie your shoes and jump into the world of widgets in order to believe that this is a neat new thing to tinker with html on your blog or website etc. in order to have widget functionality added to your webworld. Once you have registered and installed this software, the door opens to you add many new widgets to your life. There are quite a number of widgets out there. Games, blogs, mini-stores, virtual pets, and the list grows. This has quite a bit of potential as you really could have someone else tinker with your website code and you ( being less technical) could play with tweaking adding additional widgets as you wish. You really never need to tweak that first panel code.
But the question is ... Has the technology reached the point where enough people will "tie their shoes" and give this technology a try? The webpage stats on their home page shows there is quite a bit of growth in installs. But is this another piece of technology that will have to saturate the more technical people's websites before the "I Got It Factor" reaches critical mass?
This whole concept seems to have viral possibilities... Just that the person adding that first widget still has to make that small leap to install some code on their webpage. That may be too big a leap for quite a number of people. Otherwise there will be other people who will simply play with widgets installed on other people's websites....
I still sing the praises of RSS Feeds. Quite handy! Yet I do know many casual users have no idea it is a standard feature to have an RSS news reader in many browsers. Not much work to add RSS feeds to your favorites in your browser... No code. Still every day I come across people who would no idea what I am talking about .
I suppose it all depends on what pool of knowledge you swim in or the focus of your daily life.
So look at widgets. If you blog... Consider making a blidget of your blog.
I added an Asteroids game from a publisher on my widget panel. Give it a try!
All the best
Dexter
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