note: here’s a great example of a really cool widget i found. go ahead. click play and you can hear what kinds of music i’m into.
.:go go widgetization:.
widgets…gadgets…capsules…snippets…
it’s out of control.
it also happens to be a hot ‘newer’ trend in web technology.
what exactly are these things? well, let’s start from the top.
according to wikipedia:
A web widget is a portable chunk of code that can be installed and executed within any separate HTML-based web page by an end user without requiring additional compilation. They are akin to plugins or extensions in desktop applications.
in layman’s terms, they are basically mini dynamic web-driven applications usually limited to one very specialized thing. for example…a weather widget or a calendar widget or a concert ticket widget. in the past, one may’ve just bookmarked the actual weather.com site or the ticketmaster site to find the information they wanted. now a user can go to one place, like the google start page or even your desktop, and get all of these things in one central location. it adds a large measure of convenience and provides one with the choice of getting the information that one really wants in one easy sitting.
it is absolutely where the web of tomorrow is going in that these widgets are actually allowing users to piece together their own mini personal versions of what the internet is supposed to be through the use of many pieces of code. it’s kind of like programming on a super-base and very visual level. you can visualize the entire internet as your framework and widgets being the code by which you’re creating your own programs.
it all started with with a little program called ‘konfabulator‘ on the mac (because all innovative cool stuff begins with a mac… 
). it did extremely basic things, like weather and stock quotes and notes and put them in neat little floaty windows on the mac user’s desktop. sound familiar? that’s when apple decided to take the idea a step further and introduce it directly into Mac OSX. any mac user knows that hitting F12 pulls of your widget desktop that you can fill with any number of cool looking useful little widgets. then, of course, yahoo! and google jumped on the train for PCs. and now you are starting to see their proliferation out onto the web…especially on sites like myspace. now just about everyone has a video widget or a music widget or a photo widget built into their myspace page.
something very important is happening right now with the web, and that is it’s cracking like an egg. this isn’t a bad thing; it just means that, like everything else, it has become something that is being shaped more and more by the common user rather than by giant companies. but that has a lot of implications for big companies that are relying on their page content to drive advertiser revenue. going to your yahoo! start page certainly shows you the content that you’d like to get to, but it also shows you a ton of extraneous advertisements that you might not particularly want. web widgets put a stop to that annoyance. and if more and more people are jumping on board, then that eliminates the relevancy of the ever-important page view…because when you think about it, your traditional page is no longer there for people to view. people are creating their own ‘pages’. as usual, advertisers will come with ways around that, the most obvious being that you’ll start seeing some kind of advertisements in the widgets themselves. but even now we’re seeing things being take a step further in that now there are sites that are actually allowing you, the user, to create your own widgets. check out widgetbox.com. if you look over to the left you can see that i made my own widget for geochurn.com. it was extremely easy.
there are a million things i can think of doing in a web widget for businesses. ebay, for example. i could potentially build a widget that goes to ebay and searches for guitars (specific brands, years, etc.), portable mp3 players (specific brands, sizes, models) and ps2 games. all of this information could be served up into a nice little user interface that is branded in the typical eBay fashion. when something comes up that interests me, i could create a button that allows me to bid on that item. i could set all the limits directly in the widget. i could set the widget to refresh every time a new bid comes in on the item. i could even have it e-mail me or text message me whenever someone beats my bid. notice that i have not once had to go to eBay; i’m forcing eBay to send all of the information to me in a way that i want it.
here are few cool places where you can find really cool widgets and even build your own:
springwidgets
widgetbox
yourminis
snipperoo
