Snazzy-looking
RSS gadgets, which more and more people are using to personalize their homepages, are really taking off. Like
really taking off. We covered in an earlier
post how 2007 was the Year of the Widget (and how issuers should integrate widgets – another term for gadgets – into their marketing strategies) and recent figures certainly confirm this.
Gadget übergeek Niall Kennedy
reveals how
Google Gadgets alone received 960 million page views in the last week of March — a mind-blowing figure. To keep pace with the soaring popularity of gadgets, Google added 622 new ones to its directory in March, while the number of
Netvibes gadgets grew by 7% in the same period.
Easily the fastest growing Google Gadget, perhaps surprisingly, was the 'Fortune Cookie', while in second and third place were 'Freebie of the Day' and 'Weather Channel' gadgets. What this tells us about human nature is clear enough, but what's not clear is why issuers aren't latching onto this exciting new trend and technology, and creating card-related widgets that people can easily download and slot into their homepages. It's a great and fun way to communicate with cardholders.