NextWeb live blog: Khris Loux, CEO and co-founder of Web widget provider JS-Kit had a talk entitled “Web 3.0 or Web 3D?, The Decentralization, Disaggregation and Democratization of the Web”. JS-Kit is growing a suite of widgets that will help site owners optimize their website content, eventually allowing website owners to easily optimize their site based on how people surf their site. TechCrunch describes it as Web 2.0 for lazy people. They now have some 20,000 publishers.
Khris Loux reckons startups that provide extra functionality for existing websites – i.e. JS-Kit – will be very important, and will survive any shakeout this year.
Perhaps the more interesting thing Chris said during his talk was towards the end. He thinks data portability and things like widgets are in a face-off with largely non-open systems like Facebook. And he’s worried we’re going to end up in a locked-down scenario as we did when Microsoft dominated the desktop (and still does I guess).
“We have to avoid yet more Palm Sunday’s and Crucifictions by taking the crown ourselves.”
Wow, heavy analogy.
TechCrunch’s Erick Schobfeld had a good question during Q&A: Why use a widget for comments? Don’t I want all my comments on my site? I want them to get to the post on TechCrunch not JS-kit.
Chris: You can attribute the whole comments feed for that widget to a set domain. Google will attribute the comment to our company not us.
Q: but do general users care?
Chris: This is going mainstream. We’ve done a deal with a mainstream newspaper group in the US, not yet announced – WorldNow which has 200 newspapers in the US.