NextWeb live blog: Khris Loux, CEO and co-founder of Web widget provider JS-Kit had a talk entitled “Web 3.0 or Web 3D?, The Decentralization, Disaggregation and Democratization of the Web”. JS-Kit is growing a suite of widgets that will help site owners optimize their website content, eventually allowing website owners to easily optimize their site based on how people surf their site. TechCrunch describes it as Web 2.0 for lazy people. They now have some 20,000 publishers.
Khris Loux reckons startups that provide extra functionality for existing websites – i.e. JS-Kit – will be very important, and will survive any shakeout this year.
Perhaps the more interesting thing Chris said during his talk was towards the end. He thinks data portability and things like widgets are in a face-off with largely non-open systems like Facebook. And he’s worried we’re going to end up in a locked-down scenario as we did when Microsoft dominated the desktop (and still does I guess).
“We have to avoid yet more Palm Sunday’s and Crucifictions by taking the crown ourselves.”
Wow, heavy analogy.
TechCrunch’s Erick Schobfeld had a good question during Q&A: Why use a widget for comments? Don’t I want all my comments on my site? I want them to get to the post on TechCrunch not JS-kit.
Chris: You can attribute the whole comments feed for that widget to a set domain. Google will attribute the comment to our company not us.
Q: but do general users care?
Chris: This is going mainstream. We’ve done a deal with a mainstream newspaper group in the US, not yet announced – WorldNow which has 200 newspapers in the US.
I agree that widgets are going to consume our web experience
nice pics.
Facebook’s new IM just proves for dangerous it can be for app developers to bet the farm on one platform.
They develop their own chat & boom!! all the other IM apps are going going…gone!
At best they will be cheered on as a means of keeping Facebook in line & innovative, but why should they be merely some counter or threat to the bosses?
Why can’t they be the app and Facebook stick to being the Platform?
Why? B/c Facebook, Microsoft or any single owner of a platform will always want to make more money (understandably), and as long as they own the keys to the platform, they have the ability to stomp any community competition with a single heavy-handed stroke.
Why would anyone use this service ?
If anyone looked a bit they could find the scripts and the code to adds this bits of functionality to their site; in fact most CMS and Blogging tools already offer them.
And why would I want to give JS-Kit any ad revenue from my site ? A 50/50 split for the use of easy cut and past code …..no way
Funny who the interview moved towards open data and widgets…..How is JS-Kit any different than google or the rest when it comes to open widgets….They are not….It just another venus flytrap that is a closed silo
I agree that widgets are going to consume our web experience
Hi folks. I’m starting a blog on how users can make money from widgets. I have not figured it out yet.
If you have, please post a coment on my site.
IncomeWidgets.Blogspot.com
Thank you,
FunkyMark