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November 6, 2006

Fox Interactive Launches Desktop/Website Widget Platform

Michael Arrington

38 comments »

Fox Interactive Media will announce a new widget platform called SpringWidgets on Monday morning at the Widgets Live Conference in San Francisco. It is a unique offering in the increasingly complicated widget space, although the desktop portion of it only works on the Windows platform.

Widget platforms today work on websites (see Google Gadgets and WidgetBox) or the desktop (see Yahoo Widgets). Microsoft has a widget platform that will work on the Vista desktop and also on live.com pages. But no one has created a single widget platform that works on most websites as well as the desktop. That’s what SpringWidgets is launching.

SpringWidgets has a few widgets already in the library, mostly showcasing Fox content from including IGN.com, FOXSports.com and MyFox local station sites. I’ve embedded a clock widget below.

Each widget can be embedded on a website or placed on a desktop. And they are easily shared, so if a website visitor sees a widget they like they can click a link and add it to their own site, or their desktop, or both. That’s an important innovation, and a useful one for websites. For example, a blog could include a widget on the site that shows the RSS feed for the blog. Loyal readers could download the widget to their desktop.

They’ve also released a sofware development kit to allow developers to build their own widgets on the platform. They are also partnering with Feedburner to give those users an easy way to build a widget showing Feedburner RSS feeds.

In my opinion Microsoft is the largest competitive threat to the SpringWidgets platform. Fox owns MySpace, of course, and promotion there can give them a very large early boost. But they need to be aggressive about distibuting the platform - Microsoft will have it built in to Vista automatically. And they need to release a Mac version as soon as possible as well.

The technology behind SpringWidgets was originally developed by Sidereus Technologies, which was acquied by Fox Interactive in 2005. SpringWidgets is the first product from a new FIM group called FIM Labs, which also includes the founders of Newroo, acquired in March 2006.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Monday, November 6th, 2006 at 2:47 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

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  6. Big Tech Blog » Blog Archive » Fox Interactive Launches Widget Platform

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  7. StickiWidgets » Blog Archive » SpringWidgets by Fox Interactive Media

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Comments

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  1. Matt Smith

    November 6th, 2006 at 3:11 am

    Why do we need another widget platform, Whats wrong with Yahoo widgets, it’s free! I tried google widgets for some time but just found it to be slow and clumsy plus I like the style of yahoo widgets. But seriously when something is already free and working just fine why waste time copying things!

  2. Michael Arrington

    November 6th, 2006 at 3:15 am

    well, yahoo widgets don’t work on websites, and google widgets don’t work on the desktop. that’s why its new and different.

  3. Razvan Antonescu

    November 6th, 2006 at 3:49 am

    Maybe this one will motivate Yahoo! to show us a beta of their Yahoo! Go Desktop. Waiting for that one for almost a year now

  4. Tim

    November 6th, 2006 at 4:03 am

    This proves that Apple got it right 2 years ago…

  5. Darren

    November 6th, 2006 at 6:15 am

    @time don’t you mean the folks did Konfabulator and yahoo were right to buy them out

  6. dave

    November 6th, 2006 at 6:23 am

    huh? things that make no money and slow down the user experience and replicate the functionality of extensions that can be integrated more closely into a browser? wow, sounds like an awesome plan, fox really is the mother of the new internet, the one where the mom sometimes eats her own young…

  7. Patricia

    November 6th, 2006 at 8:02 am

    I see Fox’s moves lately as its answer to Google. I’ve heard musings that they want to do everything Google does and more. The capacity’s there from a monetary standpoint but I can’t avoid, somehow, the impression that they’re a little misguided. I don’t know - I have a hard time believing they can pull it off.

    However, I do think they’re doing more than the other broadcast companies - ABC is definitely doing well with moving its shows to Web and driving business, NBC seems to still be sorting it out. I just think in Fox’s race to try to match the big tech companies and offer what they offer maybe pulls away from what’s really going to be important for them competing in the overall market.

  8. Web 2.0 Web Meeting Client Free

    November 6th, 2006 at 8:17 am

    Is there a place for one more widget kit.

  9. Ernie Oporto

    November 6th, 2006 at 8:46 am

    Maybe if this stuff would use less screen real estate I would use it. This is just more Pointcast style junk.

  10. Mister Widget

    November 6th, 2006 at 9:19 am

    For the end user, the website/desktop combo is nice and the sharing capability integrated even better. You’re correct Mike, their distribution via MySpace etal and the developer kit should at least give them a fighting chance. BTW, the misterwidget.com URL is available for anyone needing a memorable domain name in this space.

  11. scooterMX

    November 6th, 2006 at 10:24 am

    We need to see beyond the browser. The browser was designed as a text, then graphical, browser. It was never intended to be an application framework.

    The low barriers to entry for development on the browser has brought ideas and creativity from a ‘non-traditional programmer’ audience, but they hit the ceiling on what the browser can do.

    Its not about blurring the line between browser and desktop/os, it’s about removing it altogether.

  12. dobata

    November 6th, 2006 at 10:41 am

    it looks like it’s acquisition time lately and taking the headlines is more important than giving something valuable to the user

  13. John

    November 6th, 2006 at 11:51 am

    Sounds like Adobe Apollo…

    http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Apollo

    Its not so much about the technology but its about the toolsets and people available to create unique applications and content on the technology.

    It’ll be an interesting few years. The ability to easily leverage Flex development into desktop Apollo applications as well as have web and local versions of them in a cross-platform context (Windows/Mac/Linux) is extremely powerful.

  14. Jonathan Cohen

    November 6th, 2006 at 2:56 pm

    The real drawback is the limited number of widgets at launch, and the lack of keyboard shortcuts. Otherwise, this could be an interesting contender, especially with the baked-in support for MySpace, Xanga, Hi-8, and the like.

  15. lawrence coburn

    November 6th, 2006 at 3:31 pm

    This is what’s on my mind following this announcement:

    - will Spring Widgets see a higher MySpace adoption than independent widgets?
    - will Fox’s vetting of developer widgets allow trusted third party providers to get javascript widgets into myspace?
    - is this step one to MySpace marginalizing any widget that does not go through their Spring Widgets platform?

    Fox oversees the vast majority of the Web’s widget consumption. The fact that they are getting into the distribution of those widgets is a huge story.

  16. Ryan Turner

    November 6th, 2006 at 4:42 pm

    The ability to put these widgets on any websites in the same way that YouTube videos can be put on any site is powerful and useful!

  17. Scott Matthews (Bitty Browser)

    November 6th, 2006 at 4:49 pm

    fwiw, Bitty Browser works with Google, Live.com, Netvibes, TypePad, Pageflakes, Widgetbox, YouOS, EyeOS, AOL’s AIM Pages, WordPress, etc. (as well as other sites via an HTML copy/paste). And Vista should generally enable Live.com gadgets on the desktop… -Scott

  18. Sam Sethi

    November 6th, 2006 at 5:06 pm

    Firstly there is a universal widget platform and it comes from http://beta.snipperoo.com here in the UK. Oddly in their FAQ they talk about not supporting MySpace because …

    “MySpace, along with a bunch of other ’social networks’ don’t allow javascript to run in their systems. We decided that even if we made a widget that would run in MySpace and the other sites, lots of the widgets in the world wouldn’t - and then we would have to impose some sort of filtering and we’d no longer be the universal widget”

    In the future when widgets become intelligent agents in the semantic web world we are moving towards then they will become very useful. Until then most of them are pointless iconic furniture cluttering up the desktop.

    Have a look at the W3C rules engine work. http://www.w3.org/2005/rules/wg/charter which gives a hint of where widgets with XHTML2, CCS and Javascript might take us.

  19. met

    November 6th, 2006 at 5:19 pm

    Maybe Fox understands that Google intends to be the monopoly in media distribution and ad realty. If Fox allows that to happen they’ll be out of business?
    Why else is Microsoft releasing Zune ? (because of iPod? pfffttt…)

  20. Rick

    November 6th, 2006 at 9:35 pm

    Quite frankly I am disappointed. Tried the RSS reader and after entering five different feeds and receiving “unsupported file format” for each one I regretted downloading the thing. Looks interesting but it’s not ready for prime time.

  21. enoch benjamin

    November 7th, 2006 at 6:39 am

    A lot of this new fangled stuff is distracting and time wasting. I am self employed and every time I start to play with widgets or a web 2.0 application I have to stop and ask myself - how is this helping me grow my business? Is this really making me more efficient? Is this making my customers smile?

    So next time you decide to spend half a day installing and playing with new widget, just write a letter or two to a new prospect or pick up the phone and work on your relationship with your customers.

    Your bank account will thank you in the long run.

  22. critix

    November 7th, 2006 at 1:38 pm

    I think you need a spell-check widget, dude.

  23. David Mackey

    November 7th, 2006 at 7:19 pm

    I’ve tried both Yahoo! and Google’s Widgets, and haven’t been overly impressed by either of them.

  24. Don Synstelien

    November 9th, 2006 at 10:28 am

    Rick, please visit the SpringWidgets forums with any feeds that you cannot get to work.

    http://springwidgets.com/community/

    We are building out additional parsers every day to support variations of feeds that are out there. If you are submitting feeds into the widget and not receiving what you expect, please let us know and we’ll help figure it out.

    Thanks for your interest in our product.

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