NEWS

Gigya Widgetizing Social Space

Adotas
September 18, 2008
By Kathleen Willcox

ADOTAS – Gigya recently unveiled Socialize — a technology designed to give publishers the ability to add social features to their Web sites and provide access to the all-important social graph APIs of top dogs Facebook and MySpace.

“We’re the only widget company doing this right now,” Liza Hausman, Gigya’s vice president of marketing, told ADOTAS. “If other social sites also release API’s we’d be happy to team up with them, but so far Facebook and MySpace are the only ones who have,” she said, noting that advertisers are most interested the top two sites anyway.

The new product was designed to enable Web publishers to focus on developing content and boosting user experience by providing them with a single point of access to multiple social network APIs and Webmail services like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and MSN Hotmail. Gigya monitors for changes to the social network APIs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, making adjustments on the back-end, so that the social experience remains seamless for site owners and their users.

Gigya also included a new community feature as part of this latest product release. Users of sites incorporating the new Socialize feature now have the option to share their activities with the larger Web site community, in addition to their sub-group of friends. This addition enables Web sites with an already active community to develop social features that facilitate interaction on multiple levels.
Hausman said that Gigya has a lot of other new tricks up its sleeve that it will unveil in the coming months.

“I can’t reveal details right now, but we do plan on running richer, larger campaigns for brand advertisers – and finding ways to work Socialized widgets into online campaigns in completely new ways,” Hausman said. “Gigya doesn’t want to focus on one single solution. We’re evolving as the market evolves. As the line between widgets and apps starts to blur and potentially disappear in the next year or so, the widget market will really take off,” she predicts.

Already, Hausman notes that an entirely new set of advertisers are already getting involved with Gigya. “It was a no-brainer for entertainment-focused brands to get involved in widgets, but now we have a lot more CPG advertisers approaching us to work on campaigns.”

Users have to opt-in to use Socialize. Gigya was launched in May of 2008 and currently has 150 million users worldwide, making it the largest widget network out there.