After the much hyped platform announcement by Facebook, the tech blogosphere is full of conversations about how Myspace is Mr. Microsoft and Facebook is Mr. Google. There are many people who offered unsolicited advice to Widget companies telling them that they should concentrate on Facebook instead of betting their hopes on Myspace. As far as I am concerned, there is no big difference between Facebook and Myspace. Both of them lock you in without an option to take your data elsewhere. Anyhow, this is not the point of this post. I just want to point out that the tech blogosphere is missing a very important point in their advice to widget creators. Josh Catone of RWW points out this very important aspect of the widget economy.
The barrier for entry in creating a widget is so low that there’s really no reason not to develop your widget on as many platforms as possible. It costs virtually nothing to create a widget, and if your goal is attracting users, then spreading your widget around makes sense.
This is exactly the case. I think it is time for the tech blogosphere to come out of their pre long tail psyche. It is the kinda attitude that made hardware vendors to flock towards Microsoft instead of developing their drivers for all platforms. They want the widget vendors to do the same thing. I hope Josh’s argument prevails and we ensure that history doesn’t repeat again.
