Netvibes, the most popular startup in the personalized start page space, has just launched a universal widget API.
The enhanced widget API, dubbed The Universal Widget API (UWA), will enable developers to create widgets not only for Netvibes but for any other Personalized Homepage in town. While the previous version of the API just let you build modules for Netvibes the current version impose no such restrictions, thanks to the open source Javascript runtime. The Netvibes UWA can easily be ported to any platform online and offline alike.
This is a win for both users and developers. Users could use any UWA widget on any platform, whereas developers could write a code once and port it to a large number of platforms.
Some sample widgets could be viewed here. A minor drawback is the fact that widgets maintain their Netvibish look and feel on other platforms as well, something that i expect to change in the future.
Netvibes has promised developers what Java once did ‘write once, run everywhere’ and similarly i expect this startup and their platform to be huge.
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