One of the biggest new-media sensations to emerge from last year were
Music Widgets. So, how we can understand and use this notion? It’s a mini-application that allowed members of social networking services like MySpace or Facebook to customize their profiles with such music features as streamed playlists and tour calendars with links to ticket sales. What helped the widget trade to boom in the first place was that MySpace and Facebook didn’t offer such services to artists and fans directly. But now that MySpace is readying a full-featured music service of its own, and Facebook is rumored to be working on something similar, what happens to all these widgets that filled that void? It’s hard to imagine that MySpace will block these applications once the music service rolls out. The company faced a harsh member backlash last year after it started blocking widgets, and it joined Google Widgets initiative specifically to give developers the tools needed to write applications for MySpace that can also work on competing social networks.