As Darren Herman states in a recent post, “widget” is one of the dominant buzzword of 2008. As the Web turned into a shattered media environment, the portable and sourceable nature of widgets made it a must-have for marketers, advertisers, and distributed service providers. That it be for your Myspace profile or for your blog, there are so many types of widgets available out there that, just like Facebook Apps, end-users are now less compulsive about those flashy little objects. The market is reaching a point where the supply overwhelms the demand, therefore a tougher competition between widget providers is getting off the ground.

So what makes a good, competitive widget? To answer this question, I turned to widget-expert Lawrence Coburn, Co-Founder and CEO of RateItAll, publisher of the Sexy Widget blog, and early-adopter of widgets (RateItAll was the first Web company to offer distributed rating widgets). Here is Lawrence’s answer:

I typically look for three things in a widget: 1) Fresh content; 2) Fast load times; 3) Easy share-a-bility. In my experience, the best widgets are those that are constantly showing new and interesting data, don’t slow down the host site, and do their best to enable the easy republishing of the widget elsewhere.

Obviously, if a widget doesn’t show fresh content, there is no point in using a widget. An iFrame with a static page src’d would do. The fast loading aspect of widgets is crucial on the end-user side of things: if retrieving information for a widget takes up too much time in the page loading process, site/profile publishers will get rid of the widget to gain in accessibility. Regarding share-a-bility, I think there are two dimensions implied there. First is the embed code that makes grabbing and placing a widget a breeze. Second is the customization features that enable site/profile publishers to adapt the widget to the look & feel of their sites.

To diversify the ideas brought in this article, I also asked Daniel Ha, Co-Founder and CEO of Disqus (Disqus is a commenting system that offers different widgets to make commenting more engaging). Here is Daniel’s take on this question:

A good widget needs to meet just a few points that immediately come to mind: a) easy to install, b) immediately useful, c) customizable, d) reliable and fast. Because widgets are usually low-barrier applications, they should be simple to install and its benefit should be recognizable from the beginning (you shouldn’t need to wait for network effects). Being customizable and reliable/fast is important because widgets are applications that are distributed across websites, but still need to feel like they’re native.

Daniel and Lawrence seem to agree a lot on the positive characteristics of a widget. “Easy to install and customizable” are synonymous to share-a-bility. “Reliable and fast” means fast loading time. Daniel also mentions “immediately useful”. That is a very good point, probably the most important now that widget consumers are getting pickier by the minute: “Will visitors interact with it/Will I benefit from this interaction?”

If we are so interested in widgets here at Click2Map, it is for the simple reason that we are developing a widget to make sharing Google Maps a fuller experience. Even though Google is doing an awesome job at bringing online maps to the masses, the sharing features are still a little limited. Our goal is to enable our users to benefit from our unique features from creation to distribution.

To follow on the great ideas shared by Lawrence and Daniel above, I would add - at least in Click2Map’s case - that a good widget creates loyalty. Maps are a way to localize places/people on a map through markers. GeoRSS enable subscribers to be automatically informed of new markers’ creation. If a widget is visually attractive, offers useful information in the context of the site it is embedded in, and enables to create a long-lasting tie through RSS-like technologies (similar to subscribing to comments in a post), then the benefits for the site/profile publisher are worth the awful sweat of copy/pasting the widget’s embed code.

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