Obama countdown numbers: that was fun while it lasted

Watching my Obama inauguration countdown widget graph shoot up like a city skyline was fun while it lasted. I think the activity has peaked now, and I have some observations and questions. (I haven’t studied widgetry; I’ve just jumped in to make them, so it’s trial and error. I like figuring things out that way.)

On Dec. 18—apparently the day the Clearspring version of the widget was listed in the Google Gadgets directory—install numbers exploded, and built through Friday when the widget was installed more than 10,000 times on that one day. Total installs from Clearspring will reach 110,000 by midnight.

Here’s where some of my questions come in. What caused it to spike like that all of a sudden? I’m not aware of the widget having any special featured status as it has on the Widgetbox home page. Do Clearspring widgets have some special pull with Google? Because my handrolled version of it had been in the Google Gadget gallery for almost a year and was installed only about a 1,000 times total. 

I’m not complaining. It was pretty thrilling to watch the traffic build over the past few weeks. At first I found it very satisfying to watch people installing it—more satisfying than writing a great blog post that gets linked to and read a lot, because people were making a more affirmative gesture, almost like a purchase. As the thrill and my compulsive stats checking faded, I started to question whether the widget was really having all that much impact.

There are barely more views than installs, so many users must be either installing and immediately uninstalling, or never looking at it. Possibly it was passed along via email by users who were enthusiastic about it, only to be installed by their friends who were not so pleased with it. Kind of a disappointment. Is that a common occurrence with Google Gadgets that are primarily put on iGoogle start pages? Could be it’s in the nature of a widget that doesn’t do much, only changing once a day. Also it’s not a typical countdown widget that includes hours, minutes and seconds. It used to, but I limited it to counting whole days early in December after a redesign. One Widgetbox reviewer gave it a single star based on that fact. People like their widget genres to be compliant with norms I guess.

What else did I learn? The same widget on Widgetbox was installed by more Ning users, where it saw many more views per install. I like seeing African-American social networks put it on their Ning pages.

What else? I learned I like making widgets that are seen by more than one person. Just greedy for attention I guess. (Hey, I have to be paid in that way since I don’t earn in any other manner from this work, though I wouldn’t mind cashing in on it. I love widgets—the whole idea of them, their form, the making process, their ease in crossing from sidebar to start page to mobile app, their viral nature, the fact that they are little and therefore cute. Heck, I guess you could say I love most everything about widgets, except for some ham-handed marketers’ attempts to make them into ads.)

I’m not sure exactly what gives a widget that property of being suitable for sidebars rather than start pages, but my bailout widget was more successful in that regard, aided by powerful blog installs including Scripting News and Seeing the Forest. Interestingly, the install on Corrente produced more views than either Dave but demonstrated a lot less viral power. I think that’s somehow a good measure of authority for a blogger. Corrente since has uninstalled it. Overall, the bailout widget’s views-to-installs ratio is about 500:1 compared with the nearly 1:1 ratio for the countdown.

Go figure. I’ll keep experimenting. Hope you’ll follow along and help me figure this stuff out.