BunchBall and the Universal Blog Widget

Bunchball the first time around, so let’s take another stab at it. On the surface, Bunchball appears to be a quick way to put Flash games on your website. But now I see that it can do much more - it’s almost a universal blog widget. Let me explain…

In this increasingly distributed world, websites need to become web services, spreading themselves right out to the edges of the network. In this case, the edge is largely made up of MySpace pages, social-networking sites and blogs. The widget, meanwhile, is the blog equivalent of the API - and the more you give away, the more you get back. (Incidentally, Scoble once referred to widgets as Internet Connected Components, raising some interesting discussions.) Flickr, YouTube, Stickam, del.icio.us, Revver and many more Web 2.0 players have successfully employed widgets to drive traffic back to their own sites. eBay and Amazon take the next step by incentivizing their widgets (you earn a % of any transaction). And finally there’s the widget to end all widgets: the indefatigable Google Adsense. Ultimately, I wonder whether we even need to drive traffic back to the originating site - it seems feasible to have all the interaction taking place within the widget itself (and in fact this already happens with Adsense). This is similar to Joseph Scott’s idea for API-only services, and you could argue that Stickam and Bunchball are getting pretty close. Nonetheless, you still need a centralized site where the user can create his widgets (or do you?).

This is all a longwinded way of pointing out that Bunchball can do much more than games. Head over to the Bunchball blog and have a look at the right-hand column - you’ll see photo sharing, a music player and even a 3Bubbles-style chat client. The music widget is particularly inspired - add an MP3 from any location on the web and it will instantly become part of the playlist. And don’t forget to check out Pig!, in which your pet pig moves between different instances of the game carrying presents (Rajat had bacon cravings at the time, apparently). Clearly, the Bunchballers understand the relevance of the distributed web and the viral power of blogs. You could put virtually anything within this Flash wrapper and set it free across thousands of sites. But ultimately we know that specialization wins - the video sites will have the best video widgets, the photo-sharing sites will have the best photo widgets and Bunchball will have the best gaming widgets. So while experimenting with every available content type is fun, Bunchball will need to stick to what it’s good at in the long term.

Nonetheless, there is another possibility. A few weeks ago I started work on a distributed photo idea. And for that to work, I need to create a blog widget for photos. Likewise, there must be hundreds of centralized sites that want to move quickly on to the distributed web - so quickly that they don’t want the hassle of building their own widgets. (For text it’s very easy, but for rich media it’s not so simple). So licensing the universal widget technology seems like a potential sideline for Bunchball or someone else.