Nick Wilson rants a bit on most widgets not being useful.

As of yet, all i see are gimmicks and whirly flashy things, where’s the use? … Im not saying widgets can’t be useful, just that the majority of them are useless fluff, and there’s no clear path to $$$’s in the production of widgets.

Currently, I use zero widgets on my production machine, two widgets on my Tablet PC (Yahoo! Widgets), and four Dashboard Widgets on my Mac. There are widgets available for Wordpress and Typepad but I haven’t spent much time checking to see what’s useful there.

I have roughly a half dozen widgets on my Google personalized homepage. As I look over the ones on the tablet, I really like the MLB widget which keeps me in tune with the scores without having to visit the busy mlb.com homepage or another third party site. Also, I use the weather widget for the five day forecast. Useful for knowing what the weather will be like for the coming days so we can plan weekend activities (even though sometimes the forecasts are off).

On the Mac, I use SysStat to keep an eye on any processes that might be hogging CPU. I also have an FTP widget where I can drag items to it and have them automatically FTP’d to a directory on one of our servers. Lastly, I have a UNIX time clock ticking the seconds off since Jan 1, 1970. In Leopard, the next version of Mac OS X due out in spring 2007, they will make it even easier for non-programmers to create widgets with something called Dashcode. Expect to see many more Dashboard Widgets by this time next year, fellow Macheads.

On my Google personalized homepage, I’m trying out the new Interesting Items for You module which tries to point me to searches, pages and gadgets it thinks I might like or be interested in. Of course I have my own created TD Keno game, you don’t, too? Shame on ya ;). Also some other widgets I could live without like a good looking analog clock, movie times (almost always visit Fandango when looking for movie times) and some other mostly useless widgets.

Nick’s point questioning the money in widget production is also well reasoned and there are a few exceptions out there too. Companies like Monkey Labs who make some of the best looking widgets on the Mac have built-in nag reminders for some of their widgets asking for donations. I like Nick’s thinking with the profit sharing APIs which, after all, if you are making a widget for a third party site or using one to promote your site, maybe you should cut those who actually use them in on some of the dollars. The same is true for any site where you are building content for them to wrap ads around like most of the tagging and list sites.

I think the big thing for widgets from a site owner perspective is they are an additional marketing tool. There is value to the website owner if the widget doesn’t use too many system resources without giving something back. They are pretty good for games and shortcut programs but they also keep people from actually visiting the website. That’s not the end of the world, as a site can still make money without people visiting the site directly (embedded ads in widgets). Short messages and news headlines can be piped in but the small space really restricts anything significant from happening inside a widget. From a developer standpoint, it’s challenging thinking about how to make widgets that would be useful to both users and the website. I’ve thought about a couple different possible widgets for this site but haven’t worked on anything yet much beyond a rough idea stage.

What widgets/gadgets/modules are you using regularly that you consider useful (and why)? What type of widget/gadgets/modules would you like to see developed? If you have an idea for a widget for this website, feel free to share that too and who knows, maybe it will get developed. You’re welcome to link to widgets below, even your own created ones fellow developers, as long as they are truly useful.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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