Widgets Live!

I’m at the Widgets Live! conference this afternoon with a sold-out crowd of widget geeks, technologists, developers, bloggers and execs at the Marines’ Club in San Francisco.

Widgets Live! is the first conference by GigaOM, hosted by Om Malik (my client) in partnership with Niall Kennedy. It’s also the first conference I’ve been to recently that’s had working and easy to connect to wi-fi (kudos to Fon. My Plazes launcher thought I was on Market Street at a former Barcamp SF location). The conference has good energy with lots of hallway networking and discussions going on. I had the pleasure of finally meeting Tariq Krim (eHub Interviews Netvibes) in person and he gave me a tour of the Netvibes search modules. More on that in another post.

GigaOM’s Liz Gannes is live blogging the event so check her post, Live Widgets! for links to various reports. Over at Wired’s Monkey Bites, Michael Calore has a roundup of the demos, including Feedburner, Grazr, Polldaddy, Yahoo Publisher Network, Gigya, and Rock You.

See a few of my photos of Widgets Live at flickr.

UPDATED: Also see Niall Kennedy’s wrap-up of the conference.

November 9: There is a W3C draft for widget standards in the works. The abstract states:

This document describes widgets. It covers the packaging format, the manifest file config.xml, and scripting interfaces for working with widgets.

The type of widgets that are addressed by this document are usually small client-side applications for displaying and updating remote data, packaged in a way to allow a single download and installation on a client machine. The widget may execute outside of the typical web browser interface. Examples include clocks, stock tickers, news casters, games and weather forecasters. Some existing industry solutions go by the names “widgets”, “gadgets” or “modules”.

Read the W3C draft for widget standards.