Click here for the interview with Chris Damsen, VP Business Development of Social Media Widget Economy Provider Netvibes.

If you want to get up to speed on the one of the latest trends and technologies on the Internet this is a great podcast you will enjoy. Chris Damsen and Netvibes are at the epicenter of the Widget Economy. Widgets are the “next big thing,” but not everyone is in love with them, there are some limitations. As Chris explains in our interview, widgets are simple to create (inexpensive too) and they have a lot of leverage since they can be distributed easily for the viral marketing and viral information distribution.

What Netvibes is doing well is allowing Netvibes users and developers to develop widgets on their open platform and on multiple other platforms like iGoogle, MS Live etc. What Chris was able to share is that there is a huge movement going on in the web and Netvibes is enabling the start page user experience to be a great one by allowing any type of content to be available or configured on one’s start page, probably the second most valuable piece of real estate just behind the e-mail inbox.

Netvibes is a Paris, France based company with millions of users visiting their web pages every month. Netvibes is rolling out a social media version of their platform on a new URL caller Ginger. Expect Ginger to get a lot of activity and the social media component of the widget economy will expand exponentially.

While we can create widgets on closed platforms but don’t you thing it would be easier to develop the widget once in an open environment to be shared across multiple platforms? Netvibes has a very robust solution now coupled with the social media component with global reach. Expect these guys to get gobbled up by one of the major players in the next year.