Web Mashups and Web Gadgets Dashboard...
As companies look for more ways of attracting visitors to their web sites and generating business online, personalization is emerging as an important component of web experience management.
The idea behind personalization is straightforward. Instead of having one web site that is the same for all visitors, you give each visitor a unique personal flavor of the site that matches their interests and preferences. This ensures that your web site delivers optimal web experience to each visitor. As a result, visitors stay on your site longer, return to it more often, and are more inclined to use the site to conduct business with your company.
Web gadget mashups are quickly gaining in popularity as a powerful personalization tool. With the gadget mashup functionality enabled on web your site, you can give each site visitor a personal area, where they can quickly assemble their personal pages by combining a few gadgets. Typically, each gadget provides access to a separate source of information or to a different application. For instance, one gadget can be used to display financial news. Another gadget can be used to show the weather forecast at visitor’s location. Yet another gadget can be used to display a mortgage calculator. And so on. Your company can provide some of these gadgets. The majority of them, however, will be provided by others. The personal pages your visitors build become mashups of content and applications from different sources.
There are many examples of this technology in action. Among the publicly available web sites, igoogle.com and netvibes.com are probably the most well known ones. A number of media companies, such as TV broadcasters and newspapers, have set up their own gadget mashups. BBC has a great one where one can mix and match gadgets with information from the numerous areas on BBC web sites. As a result, each BBC visitor can create a personal news page, which is a great example of personalization in action. Instead of buying a newspaper and reading 10% of its content, one can now create a personalized news dashboard at BBC and read all of it with a cup of coffee in the morning.
Web Mashups as a Business Tool
There are a few ways of participating in the web gadget ecosystem. First, you can be a provider of web gadgets. Second, you can be a provider of a web gadget dashboard. Third, you can be doing both.
The first one is a no-brainer. As a web site owner, you want traffic on your web site. You can use either paid advertising or referrals. Making engaging content or application available as a web gadget is an excellent web referrals mechanism. As the gadget starts appearing on the various gadget dashboards, it will start drawing traffic to your site.
UNIQLO, a Japanese casual clothes retailer, is a great example in this category. The retailer has a web site that exhibits their latest products. However, they are just one of the many clothing retailers online. As a promotion action, the company started an innovative
web project aptly named UNIQLOCK. It is nothing but a clock that is displayed in the web browser. The clock has an interesting twist to it though. Every few seconds it is replaced with a full-window view of ballet dancers doing what it is that they normally do and wearing the company’s products. The project became an instant hit on the Internet. One can go to YouTube and see many trial videos of aspiring UNIQLOCK dancers. It was also covered in many blog posts. Cleverly, the company made the clock available as a web gadget. This gadget is now sitting in numerous web dashboards and blog entries and drawing traffic to the company web site. This is viral marketing at its best and web gadget mashups are one of the enabling components.
Becoming a provider of a gadget dashboard can be an equally powerful personalization and marketing tool. This may be not be as obvious at first. I often hear doubts from people who think that by offering a dashboard they may be competing with Google, Yahoo, or BBC. These doubts are often unfounded. It is not a matter of competing with a popular content aggregator. It is, instead, a matter of delivering effective personalization to your web site visitors.
If your web site contains many distinct areas with content in different categories, you can make this content available as web gadgets, one gadget per area. The home page of your web site can then become a gadget dashboard where registered users can create their personal combinations of gadgets as they deem necessary or convenient.
The beauty of a gadget dashboard on your site is that you can reserve one of the gadget slots for displaying promotional materials. Content in this gadget can be driven by content in other gadgets. For instance, a promotion for a soccer ball can be shown next to a gadget showing soccer scores. A promotion for a raincoat can be shown next to a gadget showing local weather with a rain forecast. Not only do you deliver improved web experience to your web site visitors, you also achieve better click through rates on your web ads.
Serving Gadgets
Let us first consider what is required to become a provider of web gadgets. There are several approaches.
The simplest one is to make your web site content available as an RSS feed. There are many RSS readers available as web gadgets. It is possible to add such a gadget to a gadget dashboard and point it to your site’s feed. All the updates that you post on your site will automatically be displayed in this gadget.
If you are lucky and your content is good, you may also see a few gadgets developed by web enthusiasts with the sole purpose of displaying feeds from your web site. There are many such gadgets available for CNN, New York Times, and other feed providers.
The problem with the simplest approach, of course, is that it requires your readers to think and work in order to display your content. They have to find an RSS gadget and configure it to process an RSS feed from your web site.
An alternative approach is to use a Web Content Management (WCM) system that can automatically render your web content as gadgets compatible with a number of popular gadget dashboards such as igoogle, netvibes, and others. Modern WCM systems can easily repurpose content for different channels such as web, print, email, and mobile. Gadget dashboards for them is just another content delivery channel. If your WCM system does not support gadgets out of the box, it can perhaps be customized to do so.
Finally, your can ask a Web application developer or a designer to wrap your content in JavaScript and XML required to make it look and work as a Web gadget. You will most certainly have to follow this route if you want to achieve engaging user experience similar to the one delivered by UNIQLO. Such gadgets are usually built as rich Internet applications (RIA) that dynamically access content stored in a Web content management system.
Hosting Gadgets
In order to host a gadget dashboard on your site you need a gadget server. This server can be deployed side-by-side with your web server or your web content management system. It performs several important functions.
First, it maintains a catalog of web gadgets that are available to the visitors of your site. This is the so-called gadget white list. There may be millions of gadgets available on the Internet. Some of these gadgets may have inappropriate content. Some of them may divert traffic to competing sites. You, therefore, need to limit the set of gadgets that can appear on your site. A gadget server gives you the tool that makes this possible.
Second, the gadget server maintains a list of gadgets for each of the users registered on your site. As users build their personal gadget dashboards on your site, all the relevant information is stored and processed by the gadget server. When a visitor returns to your site, his or her gadget dashboard is rendered automatically. A good gadget server can also guess a list of gadgets that must be shown to an unregistered user. This list can be deduced from the visitor’s geographic location or from their past behavior on your site.
Third, the gadget server maintains settings and preferences entered by the site visitors for the various gadgets. Two different visitors, for instance, may both choose a weather gadget for their dashboards. One of them may set the gadget to show the weather in New York, while the other one may configure the gadget to show the weather in San Francisco. Their preferences will be stored and managed by the gadget server.
Fourth, the gadget server must provide a platform for rendering gadgets in a web browser. This is a very sophisticated component that handles the dashboard layout, secure inter-gadget communication, drag-and-drop and rearrangement of gadgets in the browser, security, web single sign-on, and many other important aspects of gadget mashups.
These are just some of the gadget server facilities. There may be many others depending on the focus of the vendor offering the gadget server such as integration with social networks, integration with WCM systems, support for server side gadget specific or user specific storage, etc.
Summary
Web gadgets and gadget dashboards are a very powerful personalization mechanism and an effective business tool. You can use gadgets placed in popular gadget dashboards, such as igoogle or netvibes, to draw traffic to your site. A gadget dashboard offered on your web site can be used by the site visitors to assemble personalized web pages with the information and layout that reflects their interests and personal preferences. It can also be used to enrich user experience by attracting gadgets from third party content and application providers.
