We are living in a Widgetized world!

Hello folks, over the weekend Businessweek ran a story about the web latest exploding phenomenon: Widgets.

A Widget is a 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. They are akin to plugins or extensions in desktop applications. Other terms used to describe a web widget include gadget, badge, module, capsule, snippet, mini and flake. Web widgets often but not always use Adobe Flash or JavaScript programming languages.

Widgets are basically a tiny piece of software which can be embedded any website and can display practically any kind of content (mostly interactive), without forcing the users to navigate away from their desired web page. In business terms it opens up nearly endless new powerful tools for advertisers and retailers who want to reach out to web users in a more personal level while brining actual interactive content into their favorite websites. Just imagine widgets actually enables advertisers as well as users to bring content from all over the Web to their own personal social-network page or blog site.

Widgets are important because they fundamentally change the way content is disseminated on the Web. Instead of going to a Web site to see a video or buying something from an online store, users can do those things from the comfort of their own personal Web page. "Web 2.0 isn't just about user-created content," says Dave Morgan, CEO of advertising company Tacoda . "It's about user-distributed content. Widgets let you take the content you created, or someone you don't know created, or The New York Times created, and distribute it."

on May 24, Widgets really took off, as the No.2 Social Network Facebook, announced it would crack open its site and hand over significant economic and distribution power to widget developers. While MySpace.com had let outsiders paste applications on its site, Facebook, went a few steps further and let developers tap into its user profile database to increase a widget's usefulness.

As you are reading this post the new economic of widgets is being shaped and changed.
Many companies and advertisers are considers their business model about widgets, how should marketers pay widget makers for their creations? And how can they judge when a widget is successful

Well we'd just have to wait and see how that develops but today's tools easily let advertisers know exactly how many times a widget has been viewed and where the widgets are being published. We are just at the beginning the world of widgets will evolve as well as its business model.

There are tons of Websites for creating Widgets, like widgetbox which also offers a large catalog for widgets to put on anyone's blog or website.

Its going to be really interesting to watch how this platform evolves.

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