Hi,
The Netvibes' Developers Blog has published their "guidelines" to conceive a popular widget and this post completes a comment I made there.
A new widget to ensure maximum popularity, should fits more that one quality; one is good, two is great, three takes the cake. Four is unheard of yet, and five wins you something:
Useful / Needed
Pretty / Cool / Personalizable
Timely
Viral
Local
Then they give also this advice about the positioning of Widgets in the Netvibes Ecosystem :
".. each widget category is sorted by popularity by default, with two others sorts being available (most recent, and Premium Widget, which is a special type of widget, created by Netvibes). So, since you cannot rely too much on the novelty of your widget - or the lack thereof, since new ones come every day -, your aim as a developer is to keep your widget as high as possible in the popularity scale."
But How to bring a Widget to the Top of the popularity scale ?Look at this widget (not mine 
): ALL MY GOOGLE SERVICES
it is very good. Perhaps the best in his category as I posted yesterday.
Now, it is competing with “old” widgets. If I search Google in the Ecosystem (http://eco.netvibes.com/search?q=google) the Top 3 have more than 20.000 downloads… The AllMyGoogle with 435 will never be able to recover to see the sky ...
The MOST POPULAR SEARCH should work for comparable time laps...
Then, POPULAR is not well mesured by DOWNLOADED or INSTALLS.
I myself downloaded a lot and deleted also a lot since then.
Good Mesure would be: IN USE or even USED in the last … days.
Even BEST RATED could be more helpfull then just downloaded.
In the end, The ECOSYSTEM Search, as it is now, is just reinforcing old Widgets giving no visibility to new widgets.
That way it prevents Netvibes users to access to them and in consequence that could lead for them to a “less good” experience…
On the other hand, as written by GigaOm, that would give space for an AdSense model that allows widget makers to pay to place their widget more prominently on the Netvibes site.
So, Widget Producers will have to pay for better placement (good for revenues) but the Search result will not be better for Netvibes’ users (bad for users) !
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