Widgetland

Social Networking is the hot area of the moment as Microsoft invest in Facebook at silly valuations.

There's a school of thought that these networs are fickle (remember Friendster or Friends Reunited ?), so they are attempting to weave their services into their users' everyday lives.
Inevitably, video is part of this. MySpace launched MySpace TV last summer, Facebook have a wide number of video plug-ins and Bebo are trying to turn themselves into the social media networking service.

But it's interesting that, in a world where you can get one device to do so many things, we still choose to have multiple gadgets for multiple tasks. My phone has a better MP3 player, but I still use my iPod; my wife carries a Blackberry and a mobile phone around with her. So it goes for web services. Google is probably the best acse-in-point of a company that is trying to be all things to all web users, but is really only succeeding with search (and now video).

Facebook have it right, in my opinion (and MySpace have had to belatedly follow suite), in allowing third party developments.

Goodbye web services, hello widgets, I say.

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