Pollack Media: Platforms and Widgetizing Social Media

Jim Kerr, vice president of new media at Pollack Media Group, wrote an article about social media, platforms and widgets. It’s an interesting read that can be found here: Platforms and Widgetizing Social Media. Jim talks about how “[t]he widgetizing of the web and the extension of platforms is a critical element of the future of social networking. Users no longer want to send people to places to view their content, they want to bring it with them.”

Expanding on this, he cites Eric’s blog post about open portals “Imagine if a portal… took the initiative of providing any 3rd party website open access to a wide range of hosted programs (with both traditional content and user participation functionality). The… affiliate platform would invite webmasters to browse for programming that improves their user experience, thus creating incremental traffic and ad inventory for both [the portal]… and their affiliate websites.”

Jim wraps it up by writing: “Creating a destination site is still important on the Internet. But the definition of what makes a good destination site is changing. In the past, a site was considered good if its content was sticky enough to draw people in. Now a site is considered good if its content is so sticky that users view it without ever visiting the site at all.”

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves!

[UPDATE: According to his blog...] Jim’s going to write more on this next week and will talk about “practical implementations of social networking which include the ability to share the content via widgets.”