We went to mashup* Events Widgets last night. There were about 200 people there, four panelists and some people demo’ing new stuff. I went along to find out what is happening on the widget scene. I was hoping to hear about some concrete examples, and was interested in hearing how people, brands, media owners are making money from widgets. So was everyone else, and the audience attacked.

The evening was facilitated by Ivan Pope of Snipperoo. He told us what it was like to be around on day 1 of the Web, about how there was a feeling that something really big was about to happen, and how it feels like that all over again with widgets. He got a bit cross with people texting awkward questions to the screen behind the four panelists. In fact, the screen successfully upstaged the panelists. Whilst each of them talked about the need for brands to give up a bit of control (fingers crossed, eh?) the crowd were engaged in their own meta-conversation. Here are some excerpts:

Is it me or is there something a bit odd about Gary Lineker? (got a laugh)

Yes, but please answer the question “where’s the money?”

I have made £0.47 from my Facebook app

Money is in girls, gambling, games…

Is newsfeed optimisation the new SEO?

If widgets replace websites, where will we put widgets?

Oh yeah - then there was the hilarious:

Can you put advertising inside a widget?

Poor old Ivan was distressed that the focus was on the money, but the panel were slow to provide any really good examples - beyond Last.FM gaining 19m new users through a widget (I didn’t really understand this example). Not to worry, the people formerly known as the audience were kind of taking over. The screen came to the rescue again:

Virgin Atlantic Facebook App cost £25k paid for itself in 3 months

Ryanair 90k installs 6000 per day

And yet more goodness from the audience, as a guy from the BBC stood up to make the point:

APIs are king, not widgets

And someone else from the Beeb asked:

Is there a point to widgets?

Ivan Pope almost lost it at this stage, and asked if there was a point to existence. Big question. I started to wonder what the point of the event was. There were several references to the skeptical atmosphere the crowd had created. Ivan reminded us that we were at the earliest stage of development, and someone else from the event reminded everyone that skeptics said this about the Web when it first appeared. Nevertheless, we should remember that people also said it about WAP, iTV and Boo.com - and they were right.

Of course, there always has to be a next big thing. Maybe it’s widgets, but I didn’t hear why last night. The most interesting stuff came from Ankur Shah of Techlightenment. His Socialistics programme sounds genuinely interesting, especially the stuff about social context and widgets tapping social wisdom to become contextually aware of demographics, taste, networks and social graph.

The other highlight of the evening was a live demo of Phonefromhere.com. CEO Tim Panton called his wife in a live:

Tim: Hello… I’m at the event… doing a demo

(embarrassed laughter)

Tim’s wife: Oh, how are you feeling?

Tim: Scared…

It’s difficult to have a serious discussion about widgets. This is probably because (as someone said last night) most of them are really trivial, short-lived and crap. The most exciting ideas for me from last night were about advertising as a service and the way websites and contextually relevant and useful widgets need to work together.