SubscribeWhy Widgets is Not Hot in China?
Kaiser Kuo wrote an insightful post yesterday on the development of widgets in China. I would like to echo some of his points and add my ideas as well.
Yes, for almost all new technology in web 2.0 field, it seems widget is the only field in which you can hardly find Chinese copycats. That’s really strange.
Chinese Internet entrepreneurs do not like the idea of widget? Maybe not. There are some Internet startups in China who like it and developed widgets already. For example, the first widget I can remember is from Douban, which was released shortly after it founder Bo Yang launched the website in early 2005, when widget is not a hot buzz yet. You can find Chinese blogs with Douban’s widget on their sidebar from time to time. Moreover, Yobo.com has widgets for Friendster, as mentioned by Kaiser. The Twitter-like services, such as Jiwai.de and Zuosa.com, have widgets as well, so do photo sharing websites and others. However, in general, most of the startups haven’t pay attention on widget.
Then why so few widgets in China? Maybe that’s because you just don’t know where to use those widgets. Most of the Chinese websites still have a strong willingness to develop everything by themselves, to build a walled garden. They haven’t realized, maybe they even fear, the power of an open web. As Kaiser pointed out, “there aren’t SNSs in China that have opened up to third-party developers” and the personalized homepage “just aren’t at all popular in China”. Under such environment, why Chinese web startups need to bother to develop widgets?
The good news is that the change is happening. Sohu Blog has launched an open widget platform in late 2007, Nokia widsets, the mobile widgets, has over 2 million users in China by Feb. Even QQ, it is said, is studying and want to learn from Facebook’s developer platform. We should also notice that the number of widgets on these platform are still very limited. Sohu Blog only have about 350 widgets available including 51 developed by Sohu itself, Nokia Widsets has about 1200 Chinese widgets available so far. Obviously, the idea of widgets has not reach its tipping point in China, even after big companies as Sohu has joined in. When will it be? maybe when QQ or Baidu open their developer platform, which I don’t think will happen in near future.
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