The future is widgets the future is web 2.0

A good example of a web 2.0 logo - click the image to see how to make it

According to panelists at the Web 2.0 Summit startups that fight to be the next "It" platform probably won't survive the Web 2.0 era. Startups that fight to be a part of the platform have a far better chance.



Check out Steve Ballmer doing his warm up routine at another conference if this man thinks the future of the internet is in widgets them Im not going to argue with him - and niether should you....

Steve Ballmer , chief executive officer of Microsoft , kicked off day two of the summit. He discussed Microsoft's latest developer strategy called Popfly. Popfly was designed for non-coders to easily write components of applications into their Web services.

Additionally, Microsoft is on the hunt to acquire and host as many Web 2.0 applications as possible following its recent investment in Facebook .

"E-mail me at Microsoft.com if you think you've got something worth buying," Ballmer said, inviting the room full of entrepreneurs to attempt a dowry out of Microsoft.

To many at the conference, this said that Microsoft may have learned that it is not the be-all and end-all of the Web and has to learn to appreciate the programmable Web.

"In the earlier years of the PC, Microsoft created this huge developer ecosystem," said CMP Media. "As they reached the limits of growth, they started to say, 'Sorry, we have to kill you.'"

But proprietary software is no longer the way of the Web. These days, those who play nicely get to play longer, as Facebook has so quintessentially shown. As the Web evolves, no one player or Web site fits all needs.

"In the early days of the Web, it was about feeding content and syndicating content," said Jeff Huber, vice president of engineering for Google. "Now, instead of applications being stuck in a single URL or in your desktop, they live in a cloud, are portable and embeddable. People are actually taking this a step further, which is the dis-aggregation and re-aggregation of applications in new ways. Putting things on top of each other, inside each other, etc. Given this, there are many roles you can play in this new ecosystem."

This is one of the reasons that widgets are so important. Users can now receive information on a need-to-know basis in spoonfuls from various sources, which forces the sources to think collectively.

"The general idea is that you're going to take your page and break it into parts and syndicated it over various places for people to interact with it," said Niall Kennedy, a consultant with Hat Trick Media and organizer of the Widget Summit. "A big change is coming with the latest version of Apple's operating system, we'll see the use of Web clips. This will create a penalty for those of us who don't create widgets because the user will do it themselves."

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