Just Don't Look Down the Barrel When the Fuse is Still Smoldering

I've been remiss in writing, I know. What can I say? Income before pleasure.

I've bought into widget mania. I'm a little late. I recently realized that one of my persistent professional problems is that I like to work on things that should happen, rather than things that are about to happen. The bets with the steeper odds pay better, on average, because in business the vig is on the side of the gambler, not the house. Steep odds have more vigorish, percentage-wise (this is true, isn't it, always? I'm sure there's some sound financial reason for it that every actuary knows and I don't.) The flip-side is that my ideas have sometimes taken longer to play out than I expected.

But sometimes things that are on the verge of happening hang fire and then I'm tempted to get involved. Widgets have been with us forever, not just since Facebook opened up their platform. Actually, I'd like to appreciate Richard MacManus over at Read/WriteWeb for his post "Widgets are the new Black." A quote:

Over time I expect the big media companies will enable this kind of functionality [the ability to embed widgets] in their platforms too... That kind of mini-app within an app is where all this is headed, from a product perspective. The bigger picture is that it opens up more opportunities for developers to leverage others platforms, and users to get more and varied sources of content.

Note that this was in June 2006, almost a full year before Facebook figured it out and did exactly as he predicted.