The War for Your Sidebar
While the ongoing widget war allows enough screen real estate for a lot of services (including Emerging Earth), Bilal Hameed points out that the war for your sidebar will not be so forgiving. He cites Google Talk, del.icio.us, and The Coop as recent examples.
These three services are just the tip of what is about to come. Other companies will roll out browser sidebar add-ons for their services in a rush. But there is an irony to it, which is that users can only have one sidebar! So either a person will put an IM client in their sidebar, or a social network. A user certainly cannot have both, because that will turn their browser into a startup page. This limitation will hinder the use of the sidebar as a tactic to acquire users and eyeballs.
Nevertheless sidebars will turn into a battlefield, because it is such a prime spot for online services to capture. The big players will likely enter into partnerships with browser vendors to have their sidebars ship with the browser itself, just like the tool bars of today. So stay tuned for the “Google Sidebar”, which will have multiple Google services shipping with Firefox.
Actually, you can have two sidebars, left and right — with The Coop being the first right sidebar I’ve ever used in Firefox — but that’s still a pretty limited space to fight over. So what’s in your sidebar?
POSTED IN: Browsers
2 opinions for The War for Your Sidebar
jhay
Apr 8, 2007 at 9:54 am
I guess just like in the Lord of the Rings, some company out there would come up with the “one sidebar to rule them all.”
Mike Abundo
Apr 9, 2007 at 5:39 am
Bet that company will be Google, Jhay. ;)
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