Widgets are everywhere and you can include them in almost all types of web pages (static pages, portals, blogs, social networks, etc…). Widget popularity grows, esspecialy with Web 2.0 applications and services.

 

But what is a widget? There are a lot of definitions (wikipedia):
Widget (web):
“portable chunk of code that can be installed and executed within any separate HTML-based web page by an end user without requiring additional compilation”

 

Widget (GUI):
“a component of a graphical user interface that the user interacts with”

 

Widget (mobile):
“a third party item that can be embedded in a mobile device”

 

Widget (engine):
“engine, such as Dashboard widgets for Apple’s Mac OS X v10.4, Windows Vista Sidebar, or Yahoo! Widgets (aka Konfabulator)”

 

So, if we turn back into web history (few years, not more, heh…), we know that main web sites ( MSN, AOL, Yahoo, etc…) were portals or gateways, offering a range of services and a lot of content for users. That sites aims to be a major starting points for web users and that’s the reason why they aggregate content in portal. The average web user few years ago was a kind of consumer (like for TV and magazines) and content creation for web was very specialized IT work. But things changed nowadays.

 

Consumers grown up. A lot of PC’s in every home, mobile devices everywhere. Content and web services become open, content creation is much easier (blogs, personal pages, social networks), storage and bandwidth is cheap (comparing with past years).

 

As you can see, these are pre-conditions for Web 2.0 also. So, if we go to start of this post where we have definitions for widget, we can genneraly simplify all that definitions: Widget is a kind of web 2.0 service and content container which allow us to aggregate and share content for blogs and social networks. Just a new tool with a new value for your business.

For site owners, widgets are new elements which offer a way to create new inventory and very interesting targeting opportunities. What this mean? Well, offering a widget on page means that you can concentrate specific content in a small piece of code or, let’s say, you have new product or service.

 

For content creators, widgets are a new way for distributing and share content cross the web and drive traffic back. And we must know that nowadays a lot of content on the web is UGC - user generated content and we, users, can share content with widgets. For example, all web videos, photos, RSS feeds, practically all multimedia which is offered for sharing is distributed and presented by widgets. Just copy&paste a small piece of code and you can have a blog or social network profile page full of content. 

 

I opened here at ApSense  the group called Crazy World Of Widgets, with intent to present ApSense users practical examples and implementation of widgets in blog posts or any other web sites. So, go there, research and use this snipplets of code for your own purposes.

Check my blog WidgetMania! with more than 50 widget blog implementation examples or my mySpace profile, my Yuwie , Lazzeo  or Pageflakes  profile where I put a lot of widgets.

Some cool widget creator and aggregator sites: WidgetBox, Sniperoo Widget Directory, Tagworld Widgets, Widgipedia....

 

And one video example for today:

How To Use a Collection Widget:
This is a tutorial on how to use a REVVER.com collection widget script.