Last week, Jeff Nolan -- VP of NewsGator's SaaS divison -- attended the WidgetWebExpo in NYC.  There, Fred Wilson gave a talk based on a blog post he published that morning called "Why Widgets is The Wrong Word for What We're Doing."  That blog post and the discussion that took place at the conference provided a fair bit of fodder for discussion on the blogosphere as well as in the tech/widget space.  I decided to ask Jeff if he'd like to provide another perspective in response to Fred's comments.  Enjoy!

Josh: There's been a fair bit of chatter on the blogosphere about Fred Wilson's talk at Widget Web Expo -- specifically that widgets, they way the exist now, are on there way out.  What was your initial reaction to this?

Jeff: This was misrepresented by a lot of people as "widgets are dead" when in fact Fred was saying that absent of providing some utility it is unlikely a widget strategy will be successful. I think you also have to recognize that Fred hasn't been entirely deliberate about his use of widgets, he throws them up on his site with a randomness that causes people to complain, and because he puts up a lot of Flash widgets he ends up slowing down his page load time. Put all that together and what I think Fred was saying is that the way he is using widgets doesn't work.

Josh: Fred's main point, I think, was that widgets need to move from living on pages to living, collectively, in a stream or flow.  Do you agree?  Is this the direction you see widgets moving in?

Jeff: That's a neat way of putting it but I don't agree with it as stated, meaning abandoning what we are doing now to go do something new. Widgets are useful as a mechanism for aggregating many feeds and even presenting an experience that is like life streaming, but that's just one thing they can do. There is also the aspect of who you are targeting. We serve primarily media clients even though over 25,000 widgets in total have been built with our service. For individuals, like Fred, the needs are different and it's less about syndicating content and more about broadcasting a "being Fred" experience. Fred has done as much as anyone to promote widgets but he's on a very forward edge and really not representative of the broader market right now.

Josh: Fred said in the talk that widgets are not necessarily monetizeable but that the services that are behind them are. What's your take on this?    

Jeff: People won't pay for widgets, they pay for the content and services that are being delivered, either through consumption of advertising or as an extension of a service they are subscribing to. The way we are monetizing widgets with display ads leaves a lot to be desired as well, the CPMs are low and it's remnant city, so in order to move that up we'll have to put instrumentation into the widget container that collects and presents more data about the individuals and their behaviors in order to drive better ad targeting.