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From Business Week: large companies, startups and individuals have been developing and launching widgets over the last few years. Widgets are small software applications that run inside a specific environment.

Yesterday I discussed a specific example – PicLens, a web browser extension for image viewing. Back on 9 January 2008, I mentioned Zotero, a Firefox extension that helps students and academic researchers organize their literature searches. CEO Lawrence Coburn of RateItAll has an extensive blog with reviews and comments about widgets, including this article about Google’s Facebook application.

Widgets are not new. Om Malik mentioned them in September 2006 in this article on Business 2.0.

Widgets a small applications that are run and installed on the client – the computer desktop, a web browser, or another application. A widget pulls specific data from servers on the Internet, or the cloud as it is usually called in the industry. Settings are usually based on the user’s preferences. My Mac dashboard includes time and temperature widgets, a calendar, an RSS widget that displays my blog posts, and an NHL scoreboard with the latest games.

Widgets can also be deployed on an intranet or extranet, but there are additional security concerns that have to be addressed, including logins and permissions.

Mac users got their first taste of widgets in 2005, when Dashboard was first included in Mac OS X. Yahoo soon followed with its own widgets for Windows users. Windows Vista and Google each have their own gadgets. Of course, most these widgets won’t work on another system.

Facebook added support for third-party applications last year, as I noted on 28 May 2007. As i mentioned on 19 February 2008, I usually ignore invites that I receive for Facebook applications. I’m never quite sure who can see my data, profile or status, even when Facebook lets me set these preferences.

Where’s the value?

As a flood of widgets, extensions, appls and other software comes to market, it’s important to ask about the value of these features. In many cases, these are little more than features or mini-sites that get embedded into the web browser or the computer desktop. The vast majority of current widget developers are writing code for their own use. Some developers post their widgets and share them with other users.

It’s rare for a company like Slide to emerge. As I discussed on 28 January 2008, Slide recently received US$50 million in venture capital, based on the company’s successful line of Facebook applications. It’s a risky business, as Slide and other Facebook app developers are almost totally dependent upon the success of the main Facebook site itself.

So any developer who depends upon widgets for their business revenue has to diversify. Costs increase as the same widgets are duplicated for multiple platforms, because revising and recompiling each widget requires some duplication of effort for each specific operating system or web site. MySpace will soon offer widget support, and various interoperability and user privacy schemes have been proposed that may let widgets work on multiple social networking sites. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has its own proposal, as mentioned by Lorelle back in November 2006. David Berkowitz has a Widget Standards wiki.
These two issues are holding back user adoption of these tools on social networking sites. Business Week’s recent revision of its social media article is a great place to turn for more information, as I mentioned on 25 February 2008.

I’ve been removing apps from my Facebook account over the last month. Some of these apps sounded fun when these apps were a novelty. Over time, I got more and more invitations from other Facebook members to add more apps.

But SuperWall and FunWall were slower than the default Facebook Wall. I didn’t really want to draw graffiti on my Wall.

The Oktoberfest app was fun in September, when it first appeared. After it morphed into beer, it became dull.

Finally, I decided I had enough. MyAquarium infected our Windows computer with malware that took 3 hours of systematic registry hacking and file deletions to remove.

After I did my little victory dance, I deleted MyAquarium from my account and reported the app to Facebook.

The New York Times ran an article today about online impression management. Academic researchers have examined how users post meaningful photos of themselves, and send carefully worded email messages. As I mentioned last June, employers have used MySpace and Facebook to investigate job applicants. Users who claim this form of background checking is an invasion of their personal privacy should consider why their made their profiles publicly available during their job search.

Because my Facebook site is linked to my university e-mail address, my Facebook site makeover continues. My page is still fun and festive, but it’s a bit more guarded these days.

This article was originally posted on my blog at http://www.bloglines.com/blog/wsodeman?id=217

http://www.tomsnetworking.com/2005/03/31/the_feds_can_own_your_wlan_too/

FBI agents in Los Angeles recently demonstrated how they can hack into a wireless network in under 10 minutes.

This demonstration used publicly available tools to set up a fake wireless access point (WAP) and then harvest enough information from a Windows XP computer to crack or decode a WEP key.

About 30% of wireless access points use Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) for encryption. Another 10% use a newer standard called Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA), which requires more time and trouble to hack.

If you’re in the 60% of wireless network users who haven’t encrypted their access point at home, this article has some good tips for you.

Tech: Slashdot discusses various efforts to transform the Internet and the Web into common nouns. This is one of those things that information systems instructors have to monitor, silly as it seems. See Wired, two entries at Wikipedia, The Chicago Manual and this article on Joseph Turow.

Tech: InfoWorld: You know you’ve got a browser problem when �?�: July 09, 2004: By Oliver Rist : NETWORKING : SECURITY: “The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, otherwise known as Dancing with Big Brother, tells the world to stop using the Web browser you fought long and hard to tie into your operating system. That’s what happened to beleaguered Microsoft when the department’s Computer Emergency Readiness Team (CERT) recently recommended users switch to alternate browser platforms to avoid the security holes in IE caused largely by ActiveX. And Microsoft isn’t objecting. icrosoft’s own Slate even posted an article advocating Firefox, a Mozilla offshoot, in favor of IE until Microsoft gets its security act together. Naturally, those alternate browser platforms have leaped on this opportunity with enthusiasm. Apple, Mozilla, and Opera jointly announced their development of an extension to their plug-in API that will handle ActiveX scripts differently — and apparently more securely — than IE does. All this work is being done in conjunction with Adobe, Macromedia, and Sun Microsystems, specifically to allow support for the companies’ plug-in versions of PDF, Flash, and Java.”