Aol buys widget tech firm to boost app ads and analytics

AOL acquired widget engineering company Goowy Media with plans to deploy widgets that characteristic programming, content, applications, and ads. Special widget-based ads will permeate AOL's ad web, and allow users to take the message to other sites.

San Diego, Calif.-based Goowy Media is a appliance creation company; its offerings include a tool to track and study where appliance appear, and how Web users interact with these small applications. Metrics such as which appliance get picked up by users from a specific social web, and how long users remain engaged with a specific widget are reported by the tool.

Goowy's assets also include yourminis, a gallery where visitors can discover and implement widgets. AOL began workings with Goowy when development myAOL last summertime. Many of Goowy's portfolio of appliance were implemented for the portal's custom start page.

For AOL's myAOL application, widgets include feeds to top news newspaper headline, calendars, weather condition forecasts, and videos aggregated from AOL Video.

Plans include Goowy facilitating widget creative activity, syndication, and coverage. The new add-on to AOL's merchandise division is also charged with creating widgets with a moral force ad unit with the ability to serve real time content and rich media-enabled applications.

As part of the merchandise division, Goowy will work closely with Platform A as the appliance ad offer becomes available. The group will be responsible for sales of appliance ads. "It'll be another tool that Platform A will be able to use as part of its tool chest or armory of ad solutions," said David Liu, SVP of sociable media, electronic messaging, and homepages at AOL. "It offering different types of feature for ad buyers." AOL's Flash chat place Userplane, was also mentioned by Liu as a potentiality unit for merchandising ad stock list, and providing working with Goowy.

appliance ads are still in the works, but will provide AOL a way to extend the portal's reach across social networking sites, third-party Web sites, and blogs. "We can turn widgets into ads themselves, and by distributing those widgets as ads, with the viral nature, those ads can be spread across to many sites and move beyond where the initial ad was placed," Liu said. "You have more flexibility to do that with a widget than just a regular banner ad."

The seven-person team at Goowy entertained other offers before accepting AOL's bid. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. AOL plans to allow Goowy to remain in its San Diego offices for the near term. "We want them to continue to work independently," Liu said.