Proclaiming “the end of search” has become the hot prediction of 2007. The blank canvas that is the search engine is no longer sufficiently intuitive in our information-overloaded lives, the thinking goes.

Instead, we need a host of applications that bring us ticker-style newsflashes, personalised information feeds, weather forecasts, our friends’ whereabouts, our holiday snaps and a communal calendar in a single location. Hence, the rise of the “widget economy”.

Net measurement firm ComScore earlier this month took a stab at measuring the use of widgets – programs that pull information from one site to another. It claims that one in five net users, or 177 million people, used a widget in April, giving us the first measurable glimpse that these tiny pieces of code are much more mainstream than previously thought. It’s the rise of user-generated content – from photo-sharing to map-building applications – that is fuelling the growth.

In fact, the ComScore data would suggest the rise of widgets owes its ascendance to little more than our desire to share photos and peek through those of strangers. The nearly identical photo-sharing, slideshow-generating sites – Slide, RockYou, PictureTrail and PhotoBucket – each drew staggering, search-engine sized traffic numbers in April, ComScore reports. Video and music referrals are big too, as is anything that has to do with geo-tagging, an activity that will explode once everyone gets back from their summer holidays and posts their photos online.

Of course, the ones most heeding “the end of search” prediction are the search engines themselves. Yahoo! recently declared that personalisation, not search, will dictate its future. And Google is on an acquisition-a-week pace. It’s latest conquest? Yep, another online slides-presentation firm, Zenter. The move that may truly pitch the use and development of new widgets into the mainstream is the Facebook decision last month to open its application programming interfaces (or API) to outside developers, linking some of the most tech-savvy and curious users on the web with canny coders. Validation from Facebook’s 25 million users will help create a true marketplace for widget developers, finally bringing a much-needed shakeout to a market where a dozen me-too photo slide-show services compete.

As a result, we will see a host of useful services rise to instant stardom while many, many more will be mired in obscurity. If you think the Web 1.0 failure rate was bloody, the widget economy will bring about absolute carnage. But the failures will be isolated events. The bruised egos will return to their day jobs still solvent, motivated to tinker again on the next useful thing. The end product will be a more utilitarian web experience for the rest of us.

The most bullish believe that the rise of widgets will bring profound changes to the look and feel of the web as we know it. “We are ending the web page era and moving to the API era,” Tariq Krim, the founder of Netvibes, recently told me.

In March, he said that Netvibes was nearing ten million monthly users with a database of a half-million widget applications – from world clocks to currency translators, blog feeds and mapping applications – delivered via RSS feeds.

Krim believes that in five years the typical net user will collect all his relevant data and application feeds from one page. Conventional bookmarks will give way to a single aggregator where headlines from rival newspapers and blog commentators will inform our world.

One of the tenets of the widget economy is that it will bring about an unprecedented era of personalisation. This much is true. But it also requires a level of openness not yet seen in the net economy. Websites will have to open themselves up to third-party developers, a radical proposition for established online properties. For news outlets, it will mean delivering news via feeds to the eyeballs rather than the established model of attracting the eyeballs to their news.

There is still a nagging problem with standardisation: not all widgets work on all sites. The problems of a competing ecosystem of applications, something we live with today, would be aggravated in a market with new widgets developed daily. Krim sees a shakeout coming, where a small number of “premium apps” become the de-facto features on users’ websites. The rest will fade into obscurity. It seems that there will be no more room for yet another photo-sharing application.

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Bernhard Warner, formerly Reuters' internet correspondent in Europe and senior editor for The Industry Standard Europe, writes about technology, the internet and media industries. He can be reached at techscribe@gmail.com