Widget Old Products With New Importance

“A widget is a stand-alone application that can be embedded into third party sites by any user on a page where they have rights of authorship (eg. a webpage, blog, or profile on a social media site). Widgets are fun, engaging, and useful applications that allow users to turn personal content into dynamic web apps that can be shared on just about any website. For example, a “Weather Report Widget” could report today’s weather by accessing data from the Weather Channel, it could even be sponsored by the Weather Channel. Should you want to put that widget on your own Facebook profile, you could do this by copying and pasting the embed code into your profile on Facebook.

Embeddable chunks of code have existed since the early development of the World Wide Web. Web developers have long sought and used third party code chunks in their pages. Early web widgets provided functions such as link counters and advertising banners.”

Peter Kim writes, “Remember widgets? In the early days of corporate social media (i.e. 2005 – 2006), widgets were all the rage. They were light and viral; the minimal effort to support them post-lauch made them more attractive to brands than blogs or podcasts.

Fast forward a couple years and I was speaking with Bob Garfield of Ad Age about widgets. This is the piece of mind that I gave him about widgets, which he published in the weekly and I think in his book:

“When you can combine utility with the purpose of your brand, that’s the opposite of why people hate marketing. Instead of fooling them with the old brand-marketing song and dance, it’s not a promise; it’s a reality: ‘This is what the traffic is like. This is what the weather is. This is what the stock market is right now.”

Fast forward another couple years and I’m listening to Tim Duggan of Mercury Girl speaking about mobile applications. Suddenly everything old is new again; the factors that will make brands’ mobile applications successful are the same principles that made a good old widget: utility, functionality, value.

If you’ve been trying to figure out how to think about the new world of applications, look back at your resources on widgets and run a find-and-replace…it might get you up to speed sooner than you imagined.”

Now there are widgets to keep you updated on widget updates, “Widget Update is a free Dashboard Widget that can automatically check for updates to the all the other widgets that you have installed. It supports Apple’s software directory, DashboardWidgets.com, MacUpdate and Version Tracker. It will present you with a tidy link list of all the updates found, enabling you to read release-notes and download the the updates quickly and painlessly.

If you find Widget Update useful, you may also want to check out its sister-widget, App Update.”

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