By many accounts, 2007 was “the year of the widget.” In November 2007 alone, 81 percent of all Web surfers saw a widget on the Web, according to ComScore - that is 148 million people – about half of the U.S. population.

These are not just ‘hit counters’ at the bottom of Web pages. New thinking has led to interactive, engaging online widget applications that can be re-posted or shared with a few mouse clicks. This has led to a revolutionary approach, where publishers are turning to widgets to reach a new audience – a group who embraces social networking and is just as likely to tell a friend about a cool new widget app as they are to talk about what they did last weekend.

In this session, the speaker will show how publishers have created a direct channel to engage in continuous conversations with their audience, letting end users establish themselves as advocates for their favorite products, movies, TV shows and brands. This has led to a new generation of networking, where social networks, blogs, start pages and other Web portals are all swiftly converging towards a single architecture, called ‘social aggregation.’

Speaker Bio: Justin Thorp is Manager of the Clearspring Developer Community. Based in Washington DC, USA, Thorp works, writes about, and develops for the World Wide Web.