I met up with CEO Jennifer Cooper of Mixercast (Widget mashup platform) last week in San Mateo (where several new startups are starting to call home, one was YouTube). We chatted over wine about the different phases of the web, and she broke it down to three succinct levels. We both agreed that the future of web strategy is distributed, and brands will need to create small applications that can travel the web to wherever communities form. Keep in mind that widgets are only one component of your web marketing strategy, the full list is here.
[As we evolve to each new phase on the web, one group gains prominance while the other becomes irrelevant, which side are you on?]
In each of the phases one group becomes irrelevant, the first phase, ‘Analog content’, the second phase, newspapers and mainstream media who didn’t adopt, and finally, the portals and aggregators and curators become irrelevant.
Like a smart fisherman (or fisherwoman) you should ‘fish where the fish are’, rather than constantly baiting your customers to return to your static website. Communities have formed elsewhere on the web where trusted decisions are being made by affinities and groups.
As a result, widgets are the new cell: it will travel, spread, and grow on different sites, and be a way for brands to ‘let go’ and let them proliferate.
Related Resources
Video of Marcia Kadanoff “The Future of the Web is Distributed” (2:42) The Beginnings of a Distributed Web Strategy The Four Pillars of a Distributed Web Strategy
