Creative Synthesis

Widgets are one of the great examples of sharing reusable expressions of need and creativity. Necessity is, after all, the mother of invention. To add another cliche, why reinvent the wheel? Widgets allow reasonable pieces of code and designed to be reused and recycled constantly. Want to show off your social networking information? Use a widget. Need to know if its raining before you step out the door? Widget. And although they aren’t as cool as sprockets or cogs, they are still an interesting growing phenomenon.

Widgets are generally pretty easy to make, most often being constructed as mini web pages from html or some xml like language and powered by javascript, although there are exceptions. Widgets require some platform layer to run in. On the web this is generally a social networking site like myspace, a blog engine like wordpress, or a more general generic distribution scheme. This is a little more work on the desktop, but plenty of people from apple to yahoo have looked at this problem.

Of course, the only downside to widgets is that a widget for one platform needs to be massaged into another. Great interoperability would help both developers (one widget, lots of venues) and users (more widgets to choose from). The good news is that more people are getting on the widget bandwagon and these different players are talking to each other. This can only mean good things.

Case in point, Widgets Live!

“Widgets Live! is the first event centered around the emerging widget economy. Web pages have gotten smaller, included as components within the desktop, personal homepage, blog sidebars, social networking sites, mobile, and even dedicated hardware. Widgets have become a distribution network, pushing your content to the edge of the web and syndicated to an increasing number of connected endpoints.” via somewhat frank