Kara Visits Slide in San Francisco
by Kara Swisher
Posted on September 17, 2007 at 3:56 AM PT
So about a month ago, I got irked by various comments execs at popular widget-maker Slide made to the Associated Press about the boom going on right now in the market for those small third-party applications that people can put on their Web pages on popular social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.
Most annoying was the idea floated by its founder and CEO Max Levchin about an IPO for Slide, so I wrote a post called “Reason to Be Annoyed by Widgets No. 243.”
As I said then:
It’s a sign to me that suddenly makes the scene feel very bubbly, given that Slide certainly has traffic, but no proven track record to continually make money.”
So after my rant, I thought it might be a better idea to go visit Levchin and see what’s what at Slide’s offices in downtown San Francisco. The start-up offers many widgets, like ones to add slideshows or guestbooks or enhanced photos, like FunPix shown here, to a Web page.
It is growing like gangbusters, claiming that upwards of 134 million unique visitors a month use its widgets. It is top widget king on Facebook, where it has more than 45 million apps installed and more than 5 million active users daily on the service.
Slide is backed, by the way, by the Mayfield Fund, BlueRun Ventures, Khosla Ventures and the Founders Fund. It has about 60 employees.
This is obviously a very interesting trend. While I often mock the widgetmania that has gripped the too easily grippable denizens of Silicon Valley, as I had said before, some widgets are actually helpful and substantive and introduce a plethora of innovation and features into MySpace or Facebook that the services would or could never have offered.
Plus, they represent an important move to widely distributed applications and content, which are going to move the Web to a whole new level of use. I often call it promiscuous computing.
Yes, naughty BoomTown, but what I actually mean is that everyone in the game has to send their products far and wide and dispense with the centralized distribution that has dominated the digital scene until now.
But does that mean these companies are more than just feature-makers? Or are they new and more distributed and hipper versions of old software companies? In other words, is Slide just a new-fangled type of Intuit?
We’ll see, so check out this video and the three others that follow. The first is a tour of Slide’s offices, followed by a three-part interview (all in individual posts below, and also with links below the first video, too) with the very sharp and articulate, as you will see, Levchin.
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Comments
In the 90’s, do you remember how many developers Palm claimed were part of the “palm economy”? At one point, the list of apps included 5,000 calculators. There are thousands of clock JAVA applets that you can download onto your mobile phone. The efficiency of the ecosystem was so great that no one could concentrate enough revenue to survive.
The only difference with widgets of today is viral distribution. In other words, can the leaders create a barrier to entry by spamming new apps to a large enough user base to prevent the other 100 million plus widget makers from diluting the market revenue? Perhaps, and Max is very smart, but the potential for user push-back to aggressive push distribution is very high.
Posted by Tom Coseven at September 17th, 2007 at 5:37 amI’ve met Max, he’s very smart. However I question the ability of a widget to make money. Remember PayPal (it’s still around and has a real business model around it. In fact it had one almost from day one).
Now that you have a chance to interview Max can you post a follow up where you clearly outline the business model for Widgets.
If you can do it from your analysis then there is a chance there is one. If you can’t then it means more analysis is required.
The only barrier to entry that I see is being first and having backers that as they say in the valley – no conflict, no interest.
I for one would really like to see someone else analyze the sustainability of Widgets.
Posted by Peter Cranstone at September 17th, 2007 at 1:25 pm