30 Amazing Things You Can Do With Widgets

Quietly and without a lot of fanfare, the number of desktop and web widgets (also called gadgets) has exploded. There are almost 10,000 Web widgets for the Google Personalized Home Page and a bunch more that run in Google Desktop. The Windows Live Gallery has over 500 gadgets that are for Windows Vista and Live.com. (This will surely pick up once Vista launches. After all Microsoft invented the widget.) Meanwhile, Apple has 2400+ widgets and Yahoo has another 4000. Finally, we have widgets for Netvibes, Protopage and your mobile device from providers like Mobidgets, Widsets and Bluepulse. (Edelman is assisting with the PR for the launch of Windows Vista.)

So what do you use these for? Well, for starters, here are 30 amazing things you can do with widgets.

Track Your Weight, benchmark your diet vs. the USDA Food Pyramid or track your water intake. (Google.com/ig)

Read four RSS Feeds in tabs, browse your Google Reader feeds or ones from iTunes.  (Google.com/ig)

Browse digg in pictures, track gas prices or count calories. (Windows Live)

Chat with others via a Google Map, track your Sitemeter statistics or send text messages. (Google.com/ig)

Browse local weather photos with the WeatherBug PhotoBug, track your Nike workouts or care for a Chia Pet (Apple).

Get a read on Outlook, track your uptime,  follow the latest in Internet humor with Spiked. (Windows Vista)

 

Listen to NPR, grow virtual flowers or view your del.icio.us bookmarks. (Google Desktop Gadgets)

Adopt a Protopuppy, listen to podcasts or play Asteroids (Protopage)

Build a virtual aquarium, play Sudoku or translate phrases from one language to another. (Netvibes)

Check the pet weather report and enjoy witting sayings from Purina, control your iPod or watch Old Faithful right from your desktop (Yahoo Widgets)

 

Technorati Tags: Apple, Bluepulse, Google, Microsoft, Protopage, Netvibes, Widsets, Windows Vista, Yahoo

Comments

[Rijk]

Hi Steve,

You forgot the Opera Widgets. If you install the Opera webbrowser (http://www.opera.com), you get a widget engine for free. Opera's widgets can use all the webtechnologies supported in Opera, including Ajax functionality.

Lots of beautiful widgets have been created for Opera:
http://widgets.opera.com/picks/

[Franck Poisson]

Hi Steven

And you forgot the Webwag Widgets. One of the most popular is the WebTV 1.0 : watch for free live cable TVs (Bloomberg, the French CNN France24 etc..More than 30 TV channels live and for free).

[Dr. Rod King]

Steve,
I agree with your comment that widgets are exploding. As I think about widgets and their usefulness in distributing content and personalising web pages, I see the Internet in the next two years being largely driven and organized ("chunked down") using widgets. The majority of Internet users will have startpages with widgets for their routine tasks. If I'm to bet on the next big things on the Internet, widgets would certainly be among my two top choices.

Best regards,
Rod.

[BillyWarhol]

the Flickr Flash Badge is still thee coolest Widget i've ever seen on the Web!

the Slide show is cool too*

i'm still trying to come up with a $Billion Dollar Widget in order to realize my dream of becoming the first Web2.0 Billionaire but i figger if i can just get a Widget to crawl out to the Long Tail & collect a measly Dollar or maybe even a Penny along the way i just might get there!!

;))

[Daniel R]

Steve,

Great round up but what about adoption? Most people I know have no idea what a widget is beyond a certain group of Apple users. I'd love to see data on rate of adoption.

The Flickr badge is one of the first widgets I stumbled upon, mostly from seeing another blogger have it.

[Justin Thorp]

Steve, Do you think widgets have reached mainstream yet or are they just really widely used by the tech community? I have seen a lot of people that have Mac OS X start out using dashboard for a while but then 3 months later they have these 30 widgets running on their dashboard that they aren't using. Do we have any quantifiable data?

[Mike Torres]

"The Windows Live Gallery has over 500 gadgets that are for Windows Vista and Live.com"

FYI that a bunch of these work with Live Spaces as well. Not just Live.com.

[iteye]

Amazing stuff. I have to apply some of these widgets to my site homepage at http://www.360Nigeria.com

[libby]

Not only can OS X users run Yahoo and Dashboard widgets, but with Amnesty Generator, they can run Google web gadgets right inside Dashboard too. OS X is really becoming the universal widget platform.

[Kirk Badger]

Isn't it amazing what Vista will let us do.

[RamJaw]

Yeah, but you still can't check the NHL standings. Who cares if you can grow flowers if you can't see how the Rangers are doing?

[Widgetop Develoeprs]

Steve,

You should check out Widgetop http://www.widgetop.com which runs Apple Dashboard widgets and Google Gadgets on a personal web desktop hosted in a browser and does not need OSX.

[Alan]

Great list Steve! I will have to check some of those out. There is always time in the day to build a virtual aquarium... :)

[tim]

I can only find these kinds of widgets:
a single site RSS reader
a little game that's been done better in Flash
to-do list
duplication of some basic OS feature

So forgive me for not getting the point of these things.

[Hamish MacEwan]

Certainly agree with Rod that Widgets are the next big thing, by delivering small chunks in a mix and match smorgasbord that will let users build a functional aggregator akin to, but at a higher level, than RSS feeds.

They won't receive their full power until the silos that enclose them are swept away by standards that allow dragging and dropping of widgets from any page to any environment webtop, desktop, or browser, and that I suspect is going to take co-ordination of the browser, source site, OS and development groups to achieve.

Fortunately, as you have noted, this process has begun, we can only hope that competing standards don't delay the resolution of this critical requirement. Competition amongst widget host silos need not be a big problem, they mostly stand to gain additional lustre to their offerings and developers can expect savings in having only a single virtual platform to target, thus the numbers of widgets should truly explode.

Until then, widgets will be plagued by the normal limitations of non-interoperability, duplication of development effort and the requirement to choose a single environment, less so on the web where one can manage a number of webtops on tabs.

While WidgeTop would appear to expand the choice of widgets, it does, require a single choice of environment, even though that environment is the universally available browser page.

Smaller and smaller pieces, more and more loosely joined. All good.

[Bithead]

Claiming MS invented the widget using the quote "the future of computing will revolve around" these small, Internet-connected applications that would live on the desktop" is a stretch to say the least. There's a difference between a coincidental prediction and actually inventing something and putting it into production, like desk accessories in the ancient MacOS back in 1984. A huge difference there.

Back then, Apple and later Arlo Rose actually made something. Bill just talked about it after seeing what others had actually done, and added what at the time was the latest buzzword - "internet". The fact the MS came stumbling along to the show many years later hardly qualifies as having 'invented' anything. Otherwise, why wouldn't they have sued Apple and Konfabulator?

[bunnyhero]

another interesting widget platform is springwidgets, which can host the same widgets on a web page AND on your desktop.

also check out widgetbox for more widgets that can be put on most any webpage...

[Rob]

Why is it so important to have widgets? I found this site the Widgets and Gadgets it also features the latest and hottest gadgets nowadays but I don't know if they have widgets in it...

[SEO Blog]

Great article, widgets have become a great source for marketing, it's just starting, we will see a lot more comming with great functionality and interactivity.