Micro Applications

One trend I have been paying attention to is the proliferation of widgets.  You may have seen them as Facebook applications like movie trivia for instance.   The way they have been monetized is by advertising.   Which personally I find very annoying, but hey, Google has made it a lifestyle.

But now we have seen micro payments being deployed. For instance I get a 2 cent a month bill from Amazon Web Services.   So pretty soon I suspect we'll see a blending of widgets and micro payments.  Perhaps with some controlling budget application which means you don't get the equivalent of cell phone minutes shock.    Google ad words let's you set a maximum budget for ad words you bid upon.  Don't be surprised if you see something similar develop in the widget arena.

I suspect this will evolve into a plug and play widget environment, where each individual user can customize specific applications to fit whatever purpose they need.   We're already seeing hints of this with Amazon's paid AMI's.  So developer's get micro payments for each use.  But now the long tail can be profitable.   It will be curious to see if this widget economy starts to displace the very consolidated large software vendors.