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February 23, 2007
Widgets - Are Web Pages Destined to be Dodos?
Now that Microsoft has introduced Vista and it's Gadget capability and creates a new way to display web content, here comes the bold predictions on how web pages are obsolete.
Whatever...
With every innovation of type, there's a group of people it suits and some it just doesn't. Look at RSS as an example. It suits a certain number of people just fine but adoption for RSS is still quite low even though most popular browser support it in some fashion or another. As with everything new, there will always be the people who were just fine with it the way it was and won't change. Not everyone will spend the time to customize their desktop to have all the usual information at their fingertips. The last I heard a few years back when "personalization" of websites was all the rage, it topped out at around 30% adoption.
I just don't believe the desire to personalize is that great if the current method of use it is largely satisfactory to the user with no customization needed.
If Gadgets or Widgets (I've just been calling them Gidgets and Wadgets to be "cross-platform") were going to take the world by storm in the space of a few short years, it would have happened already. Apple OS X has had these features for years now. And before Vista you could download software called Konfabulator that does what Widgets and Gadgets do today. It was cool and I used it back then, but it didn't totally transform my information consumption.
Now that's not to say, this isn't an important technology, but it's going to take awhile to take hold and it won't make the webpage as we know it obsolete any time soon.
So, relax and go hire a usability specialist and an ace web shop to spruce up your website. It'll be relevant for a good while yet.
Posted by Derek Leverington at February 23, 2007 10:13 PM