Widgets

A lot of people were sceptical when two gigantic investment firms, Fidelity and T. Rowe Price paid $50 million or a 9.1% stake in Slide, a San Francisco-based company best know as the purveyor of entertainments like SuperPoke, which allows Facebook users to ‘slap’ or ‘punch’ their friends. Slide was built using a portion of Slide CEO Max Levchin’s fortune when he sold PayPal, which he co-founded, to eBay for $1.5 billion. Some people believe that Slide and its ‘widgets’ could be the long-awaited solution to the problem that has been plaguing everyone in the business of selling ads on the Internet.

 

Widgets are small, self-contained programs that can be plugged into a web application like a blog or social network. The widget factory Levchin built is considered a giant in the world of widgets. It is now the largest in the world in terms of users. It is no doubt that widgets are important when you use Facebook or MySpace because those are what make social networks more enjoyable! Where in the world do you get to ‘ninja kick’ your friend without breaking their ribs and putting your friendship on the rocks?

 

Since the usage of most of the widgets is free, then where is the money, I hear you ask. Slide CEO offers you two answers. The first has to do with the changing nature of the web. According to TIME magazine, online search only accounts for 6% of what people do when they go online. So what else do they do? Even though there are a lot of people spending more and more time on MySpace, Facebook and other social networks, they are not a loyal bunch. They tend to flock towards the newest and hottest thing and will not look back again. But whenever they go, they’ll find Slide’s widgets, which can be programmed to work anywhere with just some minor adjustments.

 

Levchin’s second answer has to do with how a company measure the success of their ads. The metric most ad buyers, including Google, use does not work so well when friends are trading virtual kicks and punches with each other and Levchin thinks he has the solution, which he calls ‘engagement’. He can mine that database of 50 million active widget users for all kinds of behavioural data. Unfortunately, engagement does not exactly appeal to the people of Madison Avenue. Most advertisers still continue to price ads by the number of people who view them. So if people view the ad, the more expensive it is. Still, engagement seems to be catching on, albeit slowly.

 

So what do you think of these widgets?