On the ground floor of widget creating

SEATTLE - Snapvine is a quintessential Internet startup in so many ways.

At its loft in Pioneer Square, Cameron the dog follows secretary protocol and greets you at the door, while a beanbag chair large enough for three anchors the far end of the room.

Minus its appearances, there’s one stark difference between Snapvine and other Internet companies: It isn’t trying to create a flashy new Web site to draw in millions of users. Instead it wants to make already successful sites even more engaging.

Companies are starting to forfeit creating communities of their own and leveraging others instead. To do so, they are building applications called widgets that can run on popular socialnetworking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace.com. The strategy could signify a shift in the way business is done on the Internet today.

The concept is akin to the early days of personal computing when Microsoft started letting other software developers create applications for its operating system. Microsoft benefited because more applications created a larger and more loyal customer base.

Facebook, a Palo Alto, Calif., site that began as a social network for college students, is leading the charge.

In May, it opened up its site to allow third-party developers to build applications. So far, Facebook has drawn more than 2,000 applications. Snapvine, Amazon.com, Microsoft, BlueNile, iLike, and Jobster are among those that have created widgets, and the list is growing.

Those companies, including Snapvine, are gaining interest from venture capitalists as widgets evolve into a new marketplace.

In many cases, those large communities can mean hundreds or thousands of new users overnight for a small, widget-creating startup, although it’s the Wild West when it comes to figuring out which applications will be popular.

David Card, an analyst with Jupiter-Research, said few people in the U.S., or less than 25 percent of those surveyed, have ever added a widget into a personalized Web page. And although that figure hasn’t moved much over the past few years, he thinks they’re at a tipping point.

For widget developers, there are still a lot of unanswered questions in this new microeconomy. Primarily, most companies have yet to figure out how they will make money — despite reaching countless people.

Snapvine’s service allows people to record a voice message and send it to a friend on a MySpace page or similar site. The service is popular because people typically only communicate on social-networking sites via text. Voice adds another dimension of an individual’s personality.

Joe Heitzeberg, the company’s chief executive and co-founder, said Snapvine’s widget is on about 200 different social-networking sites, and its player — used to listen to messages — is reloaded nearly 22 million times a day by people logging on to their profiles.

Snapvine is an extreme case. It was so focused on building applications for other sites, Heitzeberg said, you couldn’t figure out what Snapvine did if you went to its own home page.

Thousands of companies and individuals have been quick to develop applications for Facebook, but most companies thought hard about whether it was a good idea to develop an application based on their business.

Heitzeberg said Snapvine knew it had a greater opportunity if it leveraged several communities rather than trying to build its own.

“You could be a niche site that is very small, but by making use of all of them, the opportunity can be much bigger,” he said. “You don’t want to have to compete with other social-networking sites.”

Jonathan Sposato, CEO of Seattlebased Picnik, is developing a Web site where people can edit photos using easy-to-learn tools without having to buy expensive software.

So far, the company has had more than 200,000 installations of Picnik from Facebook users, compared with the roughly 2.5 million people who have visited Picnik since its March launch.

Seattle-based BlueNile, which sells high-end jewelry online, also has a Facebook application, a simple widget that allows people to post a wish list of BlueNile items on their profile page.

Darrell Cavens, BlueNile vice president of marketing and technology, said it helps that the cost of building an application was low. “It wasn’t going to cost us much in terms of time to put it up there, so why not dabble in it a little bit before we go whole hog down the path?” he said. “We are pretty obsessed with value for the consumer, and not just doing Web 2.0 for the sake of doing that.”

ONLINE MARKETPLACE

What: A widget. How it works: Facebook launched a developer program May 24 to let third parties create applications for its site. Widgets may be created for other sites, but Facebook is one of the only ones with a true developer platform. Opportunity: The three social-networking sites with the most traffic are My-Space.com, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.; Facebook, a privately held company; and Bebo, which is used primarily in the United Kingdom.

WIDGET EXAMPLES

Here are some applications on Facebook:

Popfly: Built by Microsoft, it is a Web tool that allows users to create applications and add them to their profiles with no programming.

Book Review: Amazon.com developed the application to let users write book reviews on their profile pages.

My Questions: A polling application that lets you ask questions and get answers from your friends.

Moods: Lets users add emoticons to their profiles to show how they’re feeling.

Texas HoldEm Poker: Play poker with your Facebook friends. New users get 200 chips, and can get 500 more chips when they invite a friend.

Where I’ve Been: An interactive map to show everyone where you’ve traveled.