Getting a widget onto a website, whether its a blog or a MySpace page or anything else, is a bit of a pain. Users generally have to copy an embed code, log into their website, and paste it into the appropriate place. While that hasn’t proven to be an insurmountable obstacle, widget startups that have found ways to make it easier for users to add widgets to their sites have seen significantly higher growth rates v. their competitors.
Slide, RockYou and Photobucket were early experimenters in this space. Instead of forcing users to do the cut and paste, they simply asked them to input their MySpace (or other social network) credentials and then put the widget onto the site directly, on their behalf. When they first started doing this in 2006 everyone expected MySpace to cut them off for security reasons, but that never happened. MySpace let the companies log in as users and publish the widgets. Slide, RockYou and Photobucket saw growth explode. Competitor FilmLoop, who chose not to offer this feature, stagnated and is now in the DeadPool.
But offering this feature is a bit of a hassle. There are a number of large social networks to deal with, and they occasionally change their APIs or login procedures. When that happens, the feature breaks until changes are made. So most widget companies today simply stick to the tried and true “cut and paste” approach to widget proliferation.
Enter Gigya, an Israeli startup that launched a tool in November 2006 that allows people to email widgets to others instead of just posting them on websites. Their initial product is doing well, they say. And now they are launching a new product called Wildfire that will allow widget producers to directly embed their widgets into the bigger social networks (MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, Hi5, Xanga, Blogger and Tagworld are currently supported). There is a do-it-yourself option for small widget startups, and they are working directly with some of the larger ones.
Once Wildfire is implemented with a partner widget site, users simply select the social network they use, type in their credentials and the area of the site they want it to appear, and hit submit. The widget will then be placed on their MySpace or other social network page. I’ve embedded a very high level overview video of the service below.
Snapvine and Bolt/GoFish have already integrated Wildfire into their sites. A number of other widget startups will be launching with Wildfire in the next week.
Gigya isn’t charging partners for the service, saying they have plans for expansion into mobile and other areas where they can begin to generate revenue. Co-founder and CMO Rooly Eliezerov says they want Gigya to be a platform for widgets, and their first two products (Gigya and Wildfire) are just the beginning.
The company has done a lot without spending much money to date. They’ve raised just $650,000 in a single financing round from Benchmark Capital and First Round Capital in November 2006. Even though the round was small, those are tier-one investors who must see a good long term business plan.
Update: It has been widely reported that the company has actually raised $4m. This is incorrect. They’ve raised just $650,000 to date, in a single round of financing last November.
If that is a video they are using to push the service you may want to highlight the spelling mistake at the very end of the video ‘Add Wildifre’ , probably not too good for any PR they may use it for
-Mic
This is not for techy people like us. But Gigaya will help not-so-techy users handle widgets without hassle. It makes life easy for widget developers too. Simple but innovative.
LOL @ Mic P
I noticed that too…
However, 95% of MySpace users will NOT use this widget. Most users are taking caution given the number of hijacked profiles, and won’t click on URL’s within bulletins, let alone post their username + password on a third party site.
Copy and pasting embed code really isn’t that hard, as proven by YouTube. In fact, I would say it’s really no different than listing on eBay (where HTML is the accepted format) - you’d be surprised at the number of people who now claim to be HTML gurus because of MySpace [although, their claims are in doubt ;)]
@Mark Zuckerberg
I will give you 2 billion in stock and 200K USD a year for 3 years in exchange for 47% of FaceBook. Take it or leave it.
I wonder if they are well diversified, or if they are just too dependent on other sites. I don’t see them losing access to all of these sites at once, but it just doesn’t seem secure having really nothing outside of others’ sites.
#6, that’s a very good point. A few small changes on the sites it depends on could spell disaster.
Facebook is worth $1billion at most.
Rudolf,
That is simply not true. Face it. The user base makes Facebook worth $8 billion. The ad revenue makes it worth whatever it’s worth. The demographics of the user base how much advertisers can be charged. Yahoo needs to have a serious look in the mirror.
facebook has recently surpassed 21 million registered users and generates 1.5 billion page views a day. I may go in for an IPO next year if I do not get 8 billion. Google went for an IPO and now it is worth 144 billion.
I can’t believe a business can be made out of this. There must be a larger, hidden plan we don’t know about.
@ Mark Z,
Not going to debate the merits of your pricetag, facebook may or may not be worth that much, but I will say that you’ve hit the nail on the head with your comment on Terry Semel. That guy has brought the best company of the internet virtually to its knees. Perhaps if you agreed to exchange facebook for Yahoo stock you could help spearhead a shareholder revolt and get rid of him ASAP!!
a business can be launched by anyone that can fix a ”hurting” need….
- for example Im working on a model that can make 1 person companies and the revenue for each company - could be minimal and invest 2-5% into a pool for other companies -
- the point the more people a company has / the more payroll / risk / waste
- If we can minimize and only have the people we need (or close to it) we can have better more profitable companies
Mike, do you want all this fake Mark Z junk in your comments ?
I haven’t seen any worthy news lately.
MySpace widgets succeeded because Flash is perceived to be safe by end users and because MySpace took measures to ensure that the surrounding HTML is safe (no Javascript or iframes or other crufts allowed).
This Gigya thing solves a problem. I’d definitely offer it as an option if I had a site that I wanted to bootstrap with a virally spreading embedded widget.
Until a few weeks ago, Wildfire was a well-known Jabber chat server, but had to change the name due to copyright issues. Poorly-researched name IMHO, apart from other views expressed in comments.
Pretty sure Gigya raised $4 million more from Benchmark. This came out around the beginning of February.
How do all these widget sites raise so much capitol? I find it mind boggling.
anyone have any idea of a site that’s using Wildfire? They list sites that you can embed on (MySpace, etc.) but what widgets can you embed using Wildfire? I’d love to see an example
@ fake MZ — seriously stop whining about the fact that no one wants to buy Facebook. It’s not anyone’s fault but your own. You’re not going to get anywhere close to 8 billion, unless you’re acquired by Google for relative stock, because it’s so inflated right now. You compromised the brand image when you opened up Facebook to everyone — it was perfect for students, faculty, and alumni. There’s no differentiation here. You’re now competing in the same sphere as MySpace. Whereas before, you had it made with a narrow niche: Educated consumer base, higher income consumer base, higher expected future incomes, all things that advertisers love. It’s not about quantity, it’s quality. Believe in the culture of your company. Believe in creating great services. Believe in growing a brand that is unique to people. You cannot be everything to everyone. And what if you were acquired by another company? Would they squander the future growth of the company like others before? I doubt Google would have had the impact it had if it would have been acquired by Yahoo. Because the cultures don’t mesh. It’s the culture that makes Google so successful. All these companies have buckets of smart people and money, but it’s the culture that makes the company great. Does Facebook even fit with any other companies culture? If not, take the company public for crying out loud.
Well it started with the YouTube junk comment, like they got time to come here and write a 400 word+ comment. Now facebook.
Arrington you should ban these people…
@Mark Z. (fake)
Tw@t!
I agree with #4… Myspace is spamphish central, and i don’t like the idea of having to supply loginfo to third party sites. It kind of reminds me of the aggregator aggregators from another post on this site. There are just too many sites catering to the stupidity of users. What’s next, “just give us all your info (ss#, bank account, credit cards) and we’ll run your life for you because we know you’re to stupid/lazy to figure it out, but you still want to seem cutting edge”? Gimme a break… And facebook probably HAS done some seriously dilution to their image by throwing open the gates to all comers. It used to be an exclusive club, and the limited affinity relationships were its strong point. Now that they have begun their myspaceization, its only a matter of time before its inevitable decline toward the dregs of society. “One rat dropping spoils the soup.” Maybe they SHOULD go public, a great new short to rival Vonazzhh (cue the Jim Cramer dog barking sound effects)
To: mike lewis
We have been using WildFire now for a while over on PollDaddy. You can sign up for a free account with us to test it out. We provide Polls for blogs, MySpace etc.
http://www.polldaddy.com
We’re a widget company looking at this right now - seems interesting…
The code for auto-posting can be developed easily, infact ready-made code for this is available for $1k. Check it out here
http://www.improsys.com/dataposter.htm
IMHO, Its better to own the code than to rely on a outside provider
@Simon: I thought you were going to come out with something cool, hence your stealthy count down. Thanks for not hiring me though. Your company looks like its going to be in the deadpool soon. That’s kind of funny since you listed off the people you already had on your team from myspace etc… But your widget is so ugly I wouldn’t put that on any myspace page.
@Michael: Are you sure no one did SN profile certification before 2006? If that’s true, I must be one hell of a lucky guy, when I filed my patent! But I’m not going to get too excited, either they wont be around by the time I enforce it or the market will make them die out from user’s fear of spam/phishing.
All that aside, I am more than amazed at the lack of innovation in this market. It’s going to be an awesome day soon, everyone is going to get blipd!
Facebook lost its niche when it opened up to everyone, but so what? It’s growing larger than it would have grown had it stayed limited to students, faculty and alumni only. Don’t forget that students graduate, too, so Facebook pretty much had to open up to everyone. (And getting a new alumni email address sucks.)
Back on topic: Gigya looks like a great tool, I’m definitely going to try it out for the BabeVsBabe widget. For a small company like mine, this is a great timesaver.
You know everyone has the preferences, this does seem useful to either technically or time challenged people. I wonder if it is faster than embedding code?
Good points made about security too BTW.
If Yahoo is to be a serious player in the social networking space then it needs to buy my site Facebook for eight billion.
Passing on Facebook will be a mistake similar to what happened four years back when Yahoo did not buy Google for three billion. Instead it bought that junkie Mark Cuban’s site broadcast.com for five billion shortly after which it went brain dead like Cuban’s dad. Now how much is Google worth?
Yahoo must take steps to gain a real leadership position in social networking or risk not participating in what could be one of the leading sources of growth in the consumer Internet sector over the next five-plus years. It is this growth that leads me to estimate that in five years time Facebook will be worth at least 15 billion.
If that embarassment Semel does not buy Facebook then he should be fired. That is what happened to Viacom’s Freston after he did not buy MySpace. Having said that if I was a founder of MySpace Tom Anderson then I would have slit murdoch’s throat a long time ago for robbing me and my shareholders of billions of dollars. After buying MySpace for 580 mil News corp does a deal with Google for 900 mil. That was sheer daylight robbery. If Yahoo’s managers are not clueless they will buy Facebook
before it is too late.
This is also a great tinme to be a web 2.0 entrepreneur. Companies like CBS are lining up in the region of three billion for the next youtube. So there is a good chance to hit the lottery even if the product is junk. Often during boomtime people act stupidly like when Terra bought Lycos which is now dead and buried for $12.5 billion and @Home paid $7.2 billion buy for Excite.
Certainly people like Graham Spencer, Joe Kraus, Mark Van Haren, Bob Davis were my role models when I decided to hide online instead of hacking it out in a Mcjob in the real world. They created a junk startup Excite and hit a home run. Though the merger between Excite and @Home fell disastrously short of expectations these bums who took it easy in life laughed all the way to the bank. I hope to similarly be a role model to other net entrepreneurs.
I think anything that gets using Widgets on Blogs out to a wider audience other than the Techie Geeks is a great thing*
Not everyone is a MySpace GenW2r who grew up doin this sort o thing*
I’m interested in seeing how they well help the Viral Spread aspect of the Widget*
;))
Peace*
@TY (the peanut gallery) - InCircles is becoming a new company that will launch in the next month. A lot of development and great work has been accomplished behind the scenes and we are launching a very sophisticated blogging widget. InCircles was always just our an ‘alpha’ product/test and we’re over 10,000 sites right now, so some people must like it. Might I suggest actually achieving something before you criticize others.
And btw dude. Did you actually look at your email before you posted that comment. I emailed you inquiring about ‘maybe’ using your services, so your little post ends our discussions from now on. I might also suggest in future that you don’t title your job application emails ‘Genius for hire’ and then proceed to try and get me to back your company, then in the same breath ask for a job. Good luck with your own venture - if you actually have experience doing this you would understand what it takes.
We are a photo widget service that just implemented Wildfire. It works great!
Facebook:
Facebook is going down just like the sub-prime loan market did. They should have sold at the market peak.
Invest:
I must say, getting a fool to give you money to auto insert html code into someone else’s site is genius. I commend them for fooling the fools.
Bankrupt:
The investors will end up forcing these guys to do something else after their trivial code stops working on these third party sites, just like Photobucket’s code stopped working on mySpace. It’s a simple search and replace script that is implemented on these third party sites before they have to call the bankruptcy attorney.
How meta:
A widget for embedding wedgets…