clever little ticket to revenue? The one that involved tracking your behavior on commercial sites and updating your friends about it without informing you first? If so, you'll recall that it terrified privacy advocates, chased away advertisers and proceeded to go down in a blaze of user-generated fury.
Well, iWidgets, a just-launched company that simplifies the creation of widgets, thinks it can effectively monetize its products, bring traffic to destination sites, and revive the smart parts of Beacon without incurring widespread wrath. It has raised an undisclosed seven-figure seed round from Opus Capital to do it.
The San Francisco company, founded by a serial entrepreneur named Peter Yared, offers a visual interface akin to Yahoo Pipes that allows people without coding skills to build widgets that can display data from RSS or Atom feeds, embed them into start-pages and social networks and automatically adapt them to the look and feel of the platform they're on.
It offers a choice between widgets designed for starting pages like iGoogle and one for Facebook and MySpace. The first simply display data, while the second are actual applications that can access to the user's profile and status feeds. The tool comes with a number of templates whose designs Yared claims are proven to garner attention. For example, a "data widget" is for textual information, a "high scores" widget is exactly what it sounds like and a "media widget" offers photographs, audio, and video. There are also widgets for quizzes.
Established start-ups like Clearspring and Gigya already offer publishers the ability to turn their content into widgets, and most sites with content worth syndicating probably have coding skills at their disposal. But here's the interesting thing: IWidgets' main purpose is to make it easy for any site to syndicate the activity data of individual users, not just any content from the site. An iWidget lets these users install apps to pull their data into the social networks and push it into their friends' newsfeeds. To use the example Yared gave, an old-school Epicurious.com widget would display the day's most popular recipes, but an Epicurious iWidget installed on Facebook will tell your friends whenever you add a recipe yourself. What's more, a click on the widget or the link in the newsfeed can lead straight to Epicurious.com's landing page, allowing iWidget to charge for clickthroughs instead of app installs. (it is free right now, but not forever.) It's kinda like Beacon's concept without the nagging perception of shadiness.
But wait a minute: Despite big differences in approach, giving users the ability to share their activity on external sites in a central location sounds close to FriendFeed (coverage). What if FriendFeed took a cue from this concept and made it easy for sites to allow customers to share their activity with their friends, but took a piece of every successful transaction? Unlike additions to an Amazon wishlist, which most people never bother to populate in the first place, Amazon purchases are much more frequent and potentially interesting. Though it's easy to imagine some objections, as long as FriendFeed continues to find clever ways to establish what is interesting and filter out the rest, it could actually be pretty cool.
After all, who doesn't want to know which new gardening tools Robert Scoble finds worthy of his cash?