Alex Iskold of Read/Write Web has a great post in which he dissects the Random House book widget. What I like about his post is that he looks at the whole picture: the widget, back-end service, and the strategy. My short attention span summary is that a widget is only as good as the service behind it. Random House has an outstanding service.
Other points of note:
- Provides full search and thumbnail browsing of book contents
- Service behind it offers even more including full-size page views
- Branding widget delivering useful end user functionality
- Instance of the widget is on his post
This left me thinking... If I can have a widget on my web page that lets me promote and preview a book, why not a widget accessible from any of my devices that lets me read book and keeps track of my place? Or, as Alex mentions at the end of his post, it would be great to see aggregated comments from people that have interacted with the widget. Combine them and you have an instant and portable book club.
Read his post at read/write web.
Monday, June 18, 2007
Random Widgets?
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1 comment:
Just found your blog, great! Being a big believer in the end-game of distributed, dynamic content and application components all hooked into and powered by rich back-end infrastructures, it's great to see coverage like this. Blog bling is cool but rich modular applications are better ;-)
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