Widgets are by no means new, they have existed in desktop forms, such as Dashboard, DesktopX and Konfabulator, for many years, however recently many online services such as PostApp have been springing up allowing you to include widgets into your MySpace, blog or similar pages.
Desktop widgets existed to improve productivity by allowing users to gain quick access to vital information without having to open up their web browser, RSS reader or such. In my opinion, online widgets lower productivity. If I go onto a blog, I don’t want to have to wait for all the Flash widgets to download, and after it’s finally downloaded I don’t want to be bombarded with useless clutter.
When I first started web design, I chucked in search boxes for every search engine I could think of, and content iframed and JSed in from different sites. I doubt this benefited any of my (few) visitors, as it merely hindered them getting to the information they were after. This was back in 2000, and since then I’ve learned one important lesson: Keep it small and simple. You would think that in a Web 2.0 world, new start-ups wouldn’t be popping up to defy this wonderful rule.
Stickam’s latest marketing phrases sums it up Pimp your Webpage. Isn’t a prime aim of a webpage to provide information in a clear manner; the prime aim of a designer is to provide pleasing aesthetics for content to be displayed in; and the prime aim of any web developer to provide more efficient ways to post and read information?
Though sites like MySpace are aimed primarily for personal pages, I believe that the use of widgets is unnecessary. Widgets can provide people with information completely unrelated to the user’s page, such as news or weather, but I’ve yet to see a time when they are necessary. One possible use of a widget, in it’s loosest manner, it to include a guestbook through an iframe into a webpage.
It could be argued I’m being a little harsh to widgets. They do have their uses, especially if you are wishing to syndicate your content from other sites (such as del.icio.us or Flickr), and WordPress Sidebar Widgets do improve the management of sidebar content in WordPress. However, in these uses they are appropiate, and arguably productive.
Tags: web2.0, widgets, web 2.0, web2, web 2, design, webdesign, hype
I never understood why web services claimed to offer “widgets” for users to implement on to their sites. I think the idea of a widget pertains to the mini desktop applications run locally on a desktop – Konfabulator & Dashboard. All other supposed widgets are nothing more than modules. Custom content modules allowing users to enhance pages.
Widegts are a waste of time.
I full heartedly agree with your assessment of widgets. For any purpose, whether browser, website, or dashboard, widgets are annoying, typically irrelevant to the purpose at hand, and garish. With respect to Web-based servers, however, which I suppose fall under websites, I do not mind the components that can be installed into AJAX personal pages. I do not mind Windows Live, at all. And, in fact, I prefer it to most other browser homepages; especially, Yahoo!’s My Yahoo!, which is the most aesthetically displeasing comglameration of crap possible. Well, enough with my lack of any substantive insight, just felt like ranting a bit.
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Well, I take a different view on widgets (for obvious reasons if you read my blog). I think widgets can offer added value to a web site, if used with thought. Of course, throwing any old thing you can find into a site can make it confusing. And MySpace can be a nightmare – but then sometimes that’s exactly the desired effect. We call these things ‘web widgets’ to differentiate them from the OS widgets such as Microsoft widgets. Web widgets have as much right to the term as anyone else.
In my view, anything that can be embedded in a web site from a third party is a widget – and needs some management. So RSS badges, Flickr image rotators, adverts etc all are widgets in our eyes.