Behold the widget viral

Fred, talks about what a viral success the MySpace music player and the YouTube video player are. He describes the ability to click the “add” button when you hear a song you like on some random MySpace page, and have it added to your own music player, as pure genius. And he muses that the YouTube guys looked at that feature hard and then made the brilliant move of allowing their videos to be pasteable. Fred cites two lessons learned: first, people like to paste media right into their page, not just link to it. Second, every widget should have an easy “add” button. What inspires me is that a massive influx of people have just come online, and they crave content for their pages. If you enable them to personalize, if you free up your content and package it right, it’s easier than ever before to harness the viral effect.