Nov/060
Widgets vs RSS and Feed Readers
As we work on the next phase of development at Lijit, we have been thinking a lot about widgets, or wijits as we call them. Steve Rubel writes about widgets transforming blogs into start pages. I think this is a great idea, but then I started to think about how many people read blogs. Most serious blog readers use a news aggregator of some sort, either a desktop client or a web based reader. These feeders consume RSS and therefore don't benefit from widgets or advertising mostly for that matter, but FeedBurner is working out ways around this.
This brings me to wonder what will win in this space. Will users find enough value from the widgets on a blog page to venture outside of their newsreaders? Will content producers continue to syndicate their entire posts? Will a happy medium be found where newsreaders and home page destinations equalize? Will someone discover how to integrate widgets into RSS? It will be interesting to find out.