DISQUS

Hooman Radfar · 1 year ago

Nick, I recently posted on this as well - there is definitely a distinction between the two. That being said, the distinction is becoming murky.

I think that widgets are a more effective breadth strategy today given that only one platform really supports social applications - Facebook.

Social applications require a deeper investment than widgets in many cases, so my guess is that the two markets diverge and grow together. There will be many intersecting cases, but that's my thinking...

Alan · 1 year ago

Another key difference between Facebook apps and Widgets (especially OpenSocial Widgets) is that Facebook apps are currently largely focused on trivial and/or fun things, whereas the pool of Widgets is mostly (RSS) content aggregation plus some utility.

In my blog post at http://socialnetworking.activestate.com/2007/11..., I examine this difference a bit further.

I'm curious: why do so many of the popular Facebook apps focus on trivial pokes, food fights and vampires, while most widgets simply aggregate content?

Bob · 1 year ago

Nick,

A widget isn't any different from a Facebook application, what is different is how the code hooks into the base platform. For a widget to hook into Facebook it hooks into Facebook's open platform using FBML and FQL, but from that point on it is just like a widget in a widget bank on iGoogle or Freewebs. I don't think that just because you have an extra layer of code that you are hooking into it deserves a different name. Similarly, if you insert a widget into your blog (like the MyBlogLog widget) it has to hook into the code that your blog is written in which is why most widgets have adaptations for different base publishing platforms like WordPress, TypePad, Blogger, etc.

Bob
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