What's in your widget?

In a recent article on iMedia, Jonathan Mendez spoke about how the widgetization of the web is signalling a "fundamental change in the way the web will be built, searched, and navigated." I would also add "measured" to that list. The hundreds of widgets of varying utility floating around the web and the social networks have given us a vista into the next generation of web analytics.

Facebook has already propounded user engagement as the key benchmark for measuring a widget's utility. comScore's Widget Metrix has taken the more cautious approach of defining the widget view as the leading key performance indicator. At the same time, other voices have correctly drawn attention to the viral component of widget measurement, as recommendation is one of the key powerhouses of widget propagation on Facebook.

The power of widgets, and their collective viabilitity as an ad channel, is apparent to most. Social networking widgets will be able to draw on massive amounts of contextualized profile data to serve hyper-targeted ads. If you're quixotic, you can picture a future where these double as e-commerce platforms and supplement the website as a sales channel.

This is all well and good, and in the era of the metricized internet, the need to quantify a widget's reach and impact is real and immediate. True to form, we have the widget variants of page views, link clicks, and form submissions. But all I'm hearing is numbers, framed in the language of an increasingly obsolescent approach to analytics, and this is disconcerting. It took years and a whole bunch of hypertext to figure out that to thoroughly and rigorously analyze the website experience, it takes numbers + VOC. And the brightest minds in the field are still thrashing around trying to map the quantifiable limits of this esoteric concept of engagement.

All I'm saying is, get the voice of the widget user on the table from the outset. There's no need to wait.