yourminis - Widgets and a Rich Internet Application

If you track the ever-profound blogosphere, you know that Widgets are the new black. In fact, on Monday there was even an entire conference to talk about the resurgence in Widgets - Widgets Live! The widget obsession is something that baffles me in many ways; I'm not sure I get the business model behind widgets. But there is something powerful about compartmentalizing data and giving it to the user in an efficient way. I see widgets as being very lucrative for an established property that can tie a specific widget back to their core site or application. But these widgets need a platform, and there are a lot of people competing to be that platform. Earlier I talked about Microsoft's Sidebar in Windows Vista as a very compelling option. Another one I like both because of their technological approach and their brand is yourminis.

Yourminis is an offshoot product from Goowy Media inc. Goowy has made a name for itself by delivering one of the only full-featured Flash email clients, and branched out into the virtual desktop space by offering calendar, contacts, notes and a desktop interface around a series of extensions they built. The team decided to expand on that particular aspect, and yourminis was born.

What I found most intriguing about yourminis is how they implement the Rich Internet Application solution for widgets. Because they come from a Flash background, the yourminis portal is done entirely in Flash. You can browse to yourminis, log in, and have all of the widgets you've set up at your fingertips from any computer with the Flash Player installed. But the team didn't want to force people to browse to a web page any time they needed to access their widgets so they created a Firefox extension which ties back to the server and puts yourminis page front and center at the touch of a keystroke. It brings the web and the desktop together by leveraging the Mozilla's XUL engine, the platform that Firefox uses for extensions. I've been skeptical of the XUL platform as a Rich Internet Application medium, but after seeing how the Goowy team implemented it, I came away pretty impressed.

The yourminis interface is what separates it from competitors. Instead of using a sidebar, yourminis allows you to create "tabs" so that you can organize your minis into sections. For instance I have a Seattle tab that tracks weather for Seattle, blog posts from Seattle-related blogs, and the Penny-Arcade web comic (because they're based here in the area). I also have a hockey tab that gives me NHL scores and sports news. Once you set up a tab, yourminis allows you deep link to it so that you can share it with your friends. The team also provides a badge that you can use to directly link to your tab(s) from a blog or MySpace page. The tabs, and being able to share them, give the user a lot of freedom over the experience, and while it may seem a bit overwhelming to someone just getting started, it ends up being valuable. Another plus is the integration with email. They have widgets for Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, and of course, Goowy Mail. You can also set up your own POP3 server to be notified when you get mail.

One of the great examples of how yourminis blends the web and the desktop is a feature in their Firefox extension/IE bookmarklet which detects data on the web and allows you to add it to a tab on your minis. As an example, if you browse to http://blogs.zdnet.com/ with the extension installed, it detects the RSS feed of all the ZDNet blogs and you can click in the status bar to add that feed to one of your minis section. The team has implemented this functionality for MP3s, Microformats, and YouTube videos. So if you go to the ZDNet Podcast section, the extension picks up both the feed and the MP3s for the podcast and makes them available to you right from yourminis tab. The Microformats example is even better. For instance, if you visit this page about the O'Reilly Emerging Tech conference, you'll see 1 Event and 1 Contact in the status bar. You can then bring up both of those in your minis view and save them as an iCal event or a vCard contact. I've always talked about how the web is just about providing the content, and building an RIA to surround that content gives users control over it. Yourminis does exactly that with this feature by extracting what is meaningful about a page and allowing you to interact with it and use it however you want.

In order to make a difference in a space that is becoming increasingly crowded, you need to stand out. Widget platforms are becoming a dime a dozen, and with Microsoft building it into Vista, a lot of companies are going to be hard pressed to compete. But the guys at yourminis have taken a good approach. They bridge the web and the desktop by leveraging Flash and Mozilla's XUL platform, and they have fully embraced microformats, which is fantastic. As you browse the web with the extension, it extracts important content that you can add to your tabs so you can keep track of it. Yourminis isn't about implementing widgets on your blog or MySpace, it's about making widgets meaningful by focusing on web content in general. That's a model I think is solid. Down the road they are planning to leverage Adobe's Apollo project which would bring yourminis to the desktop and enhance the model even more. Keep an eye on these guys.