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03 Jan 2007
Widgets predictions
Erick Schonfeld predicts that 2007 will be the year of the widget.
I agree, I will add this to my list of predictions as well. Widgets point to something new, another way to re-use data. The idea of widgets is nothing new. Yahoo had it already many years ago and could be used to create a personal start-page. But that was only limited to widgets and data offered by Yahoo. The new thing is that one can mix data from multiple services. This is not very new either. I had weather and statistics widgets on my homepage many, many years ago.
Many of the ideas in widgets have been around a long time. I find it difficult to grasp what it is now different. One thing that is different is the visibility. It is now much more common (although far from mainstream) than before. There are many more widgets around. I find the most interesting the de-coupling of widget-code and data. Thus one can define a RSS-widget separate from the data. This can be extended to the enclosures in RSS.
Widgets are still a bit gimmicky. When will they be more useful on an enterprise level? For my business site, I only use Google Maps as widgets..
[Inspiration Marc Canter]