[ WWW: World Wide Widgets? ]
William Gibson, the man who coined the term “cyberspace,” once published a novel called Virtual Light. In an early chapter, the protagonist comments that his roommate had printed out the news just the way she liked it, with no disasters and three times the celebrity romance coverage.
This was in 1996, when Netscape still indexed every website as it appeared. Soon Yahoo! would let users customize its portal. Now, we don’t have to browse bookshelves anymore – Amazon will recommend titles we’re likely to like. We aren’t yet printing out custom newspapers, but we don’t need to – RSS (“Really Simple Syndication”) feeds will deliver news from pre-selected sites.
The Internet, as predicted, has put almost unlimited information at our fingertips. But what no one predicted was that we might actually receive less information than before.
Go to a bookstore and you’re bound to pick up something other than what you were looking for. Read the paper, in print or online, and you’re bound to browse an article you weren’t seeking. But with RSS feeds you get only what you already know you’ll read.
This trend is accelerating. For instance, our office’s new Macs now sport the Dashboard feature. Thanks to Dashboard’s “widgets,” we can check the weather, traffic, airline flights, ski conditions...the list goes on. And more widgets are available to download each day. We don’t need to even risk the distraction of Google to get almost all our daily information.
It’s certainly convenient. But is it good? In many ways, society is now less well informed. We’re becoming isolated in our own informational niches, leading to groupthink, narrow vision, and general disengagement.
Or are we?
Since we have the information we need, we’re more free to chase information we want. Every second a widget saves us is one that can be spent discovering something new. We might throw away half the newspaper unread, but RSS feeds link us to articles we’ll probably like, which in turn lead us to still more articles, and so on.
It’s scary for businesses though, because more media makes it harder to reach customers. Are they listening to regular radio or satellite? Do they see your banner ads? Will Google AdWords always work? What about email blasts?
The good news is that creativity still rules the day. The right mix of offerings will continue to hold your customers’ attention, and even make them brand evangelists. We didn’t need to see any ads for Snakes on A Plane; our kids sent us customized phone invitations to the film from Samuel L. Jackson. Last time we got sick, the CareerBuilder.com chimps sent us an e-card. The very prevalence of these widgets, free downloads, and other goodies keep users returning again and again to sites like Apple, MySpace, or YouTube. Strong advertising is now as valued a commodity as a cool music video – the good ones are talked about and shared around.
No question, the Balkanization of shared information and experiences is a disturbing trend from certain social and civic perspectives. But businesses and advertisers should welcome widgets and other new applications as an opportunity...as yet another way to earn customers.
After all, our Dashboard now sports dinner recipes from Epicurious.com. And thanks to the BBC widget, our credit card receipts now show a surprising number of British music purchases. The future of Virtual Light is here, and it’s neither a utopia nor a dystopia. It’s just where we are now.
