Widgeridoo

Widgets (sometimes called gadgets), some consider them as pesky, little buggers, others think it's the future of sharing applications. Whatever you may think, they are inspiring. Widgets are small applications that run on the desktop or on a website and that can be shared rapidly (wiki). Let's focus on the web-based widget. The web-based widget is hosted by a widget platform like clearspring or widgetbox. These platforms provide the functionality to be two mouse clicks away from placing the widget, you see somewhere on the web, on your own website. With the development of social networking sites in the recent years, you can be sure that almost everyone has a personal website. This greatly enhances the possibilities and the distribution of widgets. Let's look at an example widget. This is the web moods widget.

This widget collects the moods of everyone within a single domain. For this example, the domain is set to blogspot.com and the subgroup is telinae. The widget will compare the moods of telinae.blogspot.com with those of x.blogspot.com. This widget has several nifty features like adjusting settings for each placement and, more importantly, it 'knows' who created the widget. Knowing who 'owns' the widget is one of the biggest problems with widgets. If you place a widget on a website, there's no notion of an owner! The current solution involves the use of cookies. Anyone who presses the share button will get a cookie saying that he/she has created the widget. This cookie will later be used to check if you 'own' a particular widget. A different approach would be to create register/login functionality within the widget. While this works for sure, it makes the widget more 'heavy-weight' and less easier to use. The ease-of-use is one of the great powers of widgets, so a login is big no-no. The idea of ownership is addressed by the opensocial standard, which will be discussed in a future post. The number of widgets is growing rapidly, check it out and see for yourself. Place them on your facebook, myspace, igoogle or hyves. Let's share apps!