I'll certainly be interested in the general answer to this question, as I've only looked into Facebook in any detail. Starting last July, I was involved in project to build and launch a fairly sophisticated (by Facebook "Vampire Bite" standards) Facebook application. In terms of how familiar Facebook users are with third-party applications, my answer would be "extremely." They add and remove them constantly, as it is fast and simple to do. Facebook provides a very structured and mandatory method for adding/removing and controlling the rights of third party applications.
One of the things I wonder about is whether widgets are understood differently in different contexts. Within the Facebook environment, the user research we did (which I have to admit was with a small user panel that consisted entirely of college students and recent college graduates homogeneous in both occupation and location) suggested that they have no concept of a widget as a third-party app that can be added to multiple different sites like Facebook or a blog page via some sort of technical process. On Facebook, by far the dominant method users initially encountered a third party application was when data from that application was sent to them by a friend. So they clicked "Add this application" to view the data and that was that. Although this wasn't the point of our research, I recall that there seemed to be no dominant name users had settled on -- Facebook calls them "applications" which was what some users called them. But "profile thingy" was pretty common too. But overall, adding a widget on Facebook almost seemed like picking which zip code you want to default to when using Yahoo's yellow pages. Just yet another way of configuring and personalizing a web site. Contrast that with a blog. I blog, and the idea of manually adding and laboriously configuring a "plug-in" to Wordpress is rather familiar to me... and probably to many other bloggers as well (although I'm going off of intuition here). But I think I'm right in expecting that a user of your widget in the three places you describe them won't have close to the same expectations about them. Without knowing much more about your widget, I guess my approach would be to treat the widget finding, selection and installation experience differently for each of the instances you mentioned. ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
