I stole my post title from Fred’s readers, because the crowd is wise.
And yes, that Facebook Widgets URL results in a 404, because widgets do not exist in the Facebook Platform.
In all the talk about the Facebook Platform, the conversation has become dangerously imprecise. Please note that everyone, including curmudgeonly me, thinks that the people at FB are geniuses for building the Platform; and that FB uniformly calls third party add-ons applications — not widgets. Widgets are a bad hack arising from MySpace’s intransigence and blogging platforms historical lack of support for third-party add-ons. And thank G-d they happened, as Eric’s insistence on building the MyBlogLog widget made us money.
MySpace is feeling the pain that walled gardens bring upon themselves and blogging platforms are rapidly improving both on their own and with help from Widgetbox, Clearspring, Snipperoo etc., but widgets are still a brute force method for shoehorning standalone functionality into somebody else’s pages. And, like all first-pass club-them-over-the-head methods, widgets suck and will be quickly forgotten. The best widget companies know this and are planning accordingly. Robust, service-oriented oriented businesses offer to vanish into the background for the developers and publishers they serve, becoming components in a larger application when appropriate. Those services play nicely with other services, unlike self-contained widgets.