Widgetbox

» see widgetbox.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

In the mid 2000s I was making forum signatures on Turkish boards with my hardware list in them, which is the same impulse Widgetbox went on to sell. A page with your name at the top is not enough. Something on it has to move, or count, or tell the time, so that a visitor can see the page is tended rather than merely posted. Every era of the personal web has had a shop for this and Widgetbox was the one that served the blog years.

It started in San Francisco in 2006, built by Ed Anuff with Giles Goodwin and Dean Moses. The product was a gallery plus a builder. You browsed for a widget, got a block of HTML back, and pasted the block into a Blogger template or a MySpace profile or anywhere else the host had not locked the markup down. On the other side, anyone could publish a widget into the gallery and watch it spread across strangers' pages, which is how a clock made by one person ended up ticking on ten thousand sites.

Money followed quickly. Sequoia Capital and Hummer Winblad came in during 2007, and in January 2008 an eight million dollar round arrived with Northgate Capital and the investor Michael Dearing alongside them. That was the peak of what the industry briefly called the widget economy, when serious people believed the unit of the web was about to become a small embeddable thing rather than a page.

They were not wrong about embedding. They were wrong about who would own it. Facebook took the wall and phones took the browsing, and the sidebar that Widgetbox decorated stopped being a place anyone looked at.

~ the dossier ~

~ what a widget was ~

The word got reused twice after this, so here is what it meant at the time. A Widgetbox widget was a fragment of someone else's site that lived on yours. A weather box, a visitor counter, a slideshow of photographs, a poll, a feed of headlines from somewhere you liked. You did not host it and you could not fix it. It ran on servers you had no relationship with, inside a page you had made.

Which is the trade nobody was reading closely at the time. Personal pages in that decade were assembled out of parts borrowed from companies, and each part carried the borrowed company's lifespan inside it. When one of those companies changed direction, a thousand pages developed a rectangular hole, and most of the people who owned those pages had stopped logging in years before.

~ the pivot ~

By early 2011 the company had renamed itself Flite and pointed the same technology at advertising, building rich interactive ad units for publishers including Forbes and LinkedIn. It is a rational move: the thing Widgetbox was actually good at was delivering an interactive object into a page it did not control, and the people who pay properly for that are advertisers, not bloggers.

The original service stayed up for three more years in the way products do when nobody wants to be the one to kill them. Paying subscribers kept their widgets running until the end. Widgetbox was formally discontinued on 28 March 2014, by which time the company answering the phone had a different name and a different business.

~ what got buried with it ~

Nothing dramatic happened on the day. There was no last post and no outcry, because by 2014 the pages that ran these things were already abandoned. What broke was scattered across dead blogs nobody was reading, which is the quietest way for a service to end and by far the most common.

The habit outlived the company. Embed codes are still how anyone puts a video or a map into a page they own, and the terms of the deal have not changed at all. The object is free and it belongs to someone else, so it works exactly as long as they feel like running it.

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