Widgets + RSS = No Good
I love widgets, everything about widgets. The technology is cool and the concept is solid.  There’s the Lijit Wijit, the Twitter widget, the MyblogLog widget, the NewsGator widget, the SpringBox widgets, the the FeedBurner widget, the Mpire widget, etc etc… Wow, there are so many damn widgets out there it’ll make your head spin and your web property light up like a strip mall 
Widgets provide a great way to add value to the widget maker, the widget publisher, and the widget consumer. Take the NewsGator widget for example… I put Buzz Boxes on my blog and it provides me with a cool new feature set w/o doing any work - I like that. The readers of my blog get extra relevant content - I essentially have two RSS readers on my blog that are pulling in content related to technology and mobility. And hopefully NewsGator gets some click backs! Everyone wins…. right? Well not really.
I use aggregators to get all my content… FeedDemon on my laptop and desktop and Go! on my mobile device. This is where widgets break down. I don’t see mine or anyone else’s widgets in my readers. That sucks! At least for now…
The RSS community needs to create a widget extension, so I can get all this widgety goodness in my aggregators. I briefly talked about this with Stan James at the last Boulder Technology Meetup. This needs to happen… anyone else feeling this pain and wanting to contribute?
1 comment May 10th, 2007