Widget Backlash
So this is not unanticipated...but there have been some recent posts that have caught my eye regarding the use of widgets. Scott Karp over at Publishing 2.0 wonders "Will Widgets Hit A Mainstream Wall Like RSS"? First, I don't think that a lack of instant adoption by 95% of the population equates to hitting a wall (my hyperbole inserted, not Scott's). I think that what we have called RSS will become a background functionality that non-Alpha Geeks will just take for granted and the same goes for widgets. Erik Schonfeld, in the comments section, offers this definition for widgets that I like:
"Widgets are tiny applications that automatically push all sorts of data
from the Web (like weather, headlines, Flickr photos) to your desktop
or personal Webpage, and allow you to interact with those other
Websites without actually visiting them."
Now Jeremy Zawodny also so has some ideas about widgets and I wonder if you can guess how he feels about them from this post "JavaScript Badges and Widgets Considered Harmful." Now I actually think Jeremy's got some spot-on critiques of widgets and their implementations but I think that we do need to make a distinction here.
Many of the criticisms in these posts deal with Web-based widgets or those that would live on your Web page or blog and to be truthful - there are issues there, pageloads being one of them. I know I have had to pare back on this site. I think one distinction need to be made though between Web and desktop-based widgets. I think that on the desktop, running widgets in place of full-blown applications, could actually end up saving some computing cycles versus costing you more.
The other distinction deals with separating the idea from the form. What I mean is that I hope that we won't get caught up in discussion of the current problems with widgets and forget their game-changing quality in terms of popularizing to a greater degree than ever before, the idea that not only data but functionality could be broken up into smaller pieces and still be incredible useful...like this little guy that provides translation services on your desktop...
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