Adding widgets inside mail - have we seen this before

Now ask most email users and they'll tell you that this is a great idea and its new and its wonderful. Not that I dont think its a great idea, its just that I think I've seen this before. On iGoogle. Basically the idea of widgets has been around for a while now and iGoogle didn't do as well as people expected, I don't suppose Yahoo's My Yahoo! did very well either. Why? Because you dont want to customize something you dont use very often.

This doesn't mean people dont use Google and Yahoo. It just means that people don't use the Google page and the Yahoo main page very often. Now you might see the unique visitor traffic, the page views on those and say they're in millions so obv people are coming there. Thats true. But they're coming there to do "something on the page" not to "see the page".

But email, its different. People login to gmail to well read and send emails. So its a great place to integrate apps. Also Firefox plugins like RTM in Gmail are hugely popular. Just goes to show why widgets in email will work. In a way chat in Gmail itself is a widget.

So i wonder if web pages will be taken over by apps (or widgets) and people will choose where they want to put them. So its not a page we'll be used to but rather the service provided by that provider, whether it is on a page or via an app or maybe even an application you install on your computer or mobile. End of the day, its not the medium but the service that we're interested in.

By the way, Facebook really showed the way when it comes to apps. The problem is that people don't associate Facebook with any one functionality. Its basically a place where you can connect with people you are close to. Google has now integrated Calendar and Docs into Gmail and also has provided a way to add other custom widgets, although its a little complicated to do that right now. Exciting stuff ahead I hope :)

Official Gmail Blog: New in Labs: Calendar and Docs gadgets

Cheers,
KP.

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