netvibes - (re)mix the web

It’s already been a few days (more than two weeks, even) since we officially released the UWA and its accompanying documentation and forum. Since then, we took the time to watch, listen and learn. The UWA is still a work in progress, and we need you to help make it the coolest widget engine around.

First, a bit about what the UWA brings to the table. Although most of you already know the basics thanks to the announcement post and the introductory page, we’d like to take this “first post” opportunity to sum it all up for you.

In short, UWA does to the widget ecosystem what Netvibes does to your online life: bringing it all together in one place, thus making it easy for developers to target multiple platforms, and for users the use their favourite widget on the platform of their choice.

We’ve had our Mini-Module API for more than a year now, and it brought in a lot of modules, and much more choices of content for Netvibes users. It was time to open even more doors to both our users and developers - and what better doors than those of other widget platforms?

The new Netvibes API is not dubbed Universal Widget API as a publicity stunt: we are indeed working hard at making UWA widgets work in most available platforms. The first ones, as you know already, are Google IG and the Apple Dashboard. Soon to be announced are the Opera and blog-export support. More are coming down the pipes already - you might be surprised…

To make UWA available as wide as possible, we will soon release the UWA runtime under an open-source licence: we want to make UWA as open as possible, and we hope in turn to see the UWA be ported by developers to platforms we haven’t yet thought of.

A lot of you have been reminding us that there already is a widget standardization process hosted by the W3C. We are of course very much aware of that, and while, contrary to the W3C specification, Netvibes UWA works right now, we are open to collaboration with other developers and organizations, in order to make UWA evolve in the right direction. The open-source runtime is one proof that the UWA is not designed to be a closed format, and we intend to give more proofs of our openness in the coming times…

Watch this space.

Tags: presentation, uwa

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 27th, 2007 at 10:17 am and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.