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snipperoo.com
Ivan Pope of Snipperoo thinks widgets offer ample content potential, in the "small pieces loosely joined" mode. |
I am at the
Lift Conference in Geneva at the moment, and had a chat with UK entrepreneur
Ivan Pope. Pope suggested he was the world "first Web entrepreneur" when he started his company Netnames, and with it a whole domain name industry. He sold the company in 2000, took a few years off, and now is active with
Snipperoo, which provides an organization tool for widgets.
Widgets are small applications that can run on a desktop, Web site or mobile phone. They constantly pull in updated information from the Internet. "Applications" might be too narrow a term -- a widget can be anything distributed to a net-enabled device: a video, weather icon, sports score badge, etc. People use widgets to get easy access to info, spice up their weblog, or combine information from different sources on a site. To follow current thinking on widgets, see Snipperoo's blog.
Pope believes that widgets will play a huge role in the future of content -- or in his own words, "All content needs to be loosed in the smallest particles possible (widgetized). Then it will reform itself into valid and relevant units, driven by the consumers of that content."
Pope and I also discussed how the present market frenzy reminds us of the years between 1995 and 2000, when Internet companies boomed and there was no end to the energy people poured into their work. When the net bubble burst, it not only seemed the result of inflated market figures, but also of personal exhaustion all round. We had all worked too long, too hard, too many hours.
With all this new energy now in the market -- tangible at events like Lift -- has anything changed? Says Pope: "You know what the difference seems to be. At Web 1.0 everyone was single and childless. At Web 2.0 we all have kids."
We have grown up with this industry, and the industry is growing up with us. Yes, there are lots of people who are younger than we are. But it still seems there are not many older than us.
