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October 4, 2006 11:45 AM PDT

Google Gadgets: More widgets for Web sites

by Rafe Needleman

We're entering an era of widgets. People have taken to building Web pages by piecing together chunks of functional code that come from all over. If you're interested in adding widgets to your pages, though, there are at the moment only a few good directors to grab them from. One of them is Widgetbox, which I've covered previously. And now there's Google, which has made it possible for widgets written for its own Google Desktop app to be installed in your own Web pages. Here's the current directory. See news story.

Mashable points out that Google's widgets use JavaScript, which is blocked on many social network sites (like MySpace). However people who run their own blogs or sites should not have a problem using the widgets. MySpace and other social network users should check out The SpringBox, MySpace's own entre into the widget space. Its widgets can be embedded almost anywhere.

I imagine it's just a matter of time until Yahoo figures out how to make its excellent Yahoo Widgets gizmos insertable into Web pages.

Be prepared for a lot of cluttered, widget-drunk Web pages. On the other hand, there are very good and reasonable uses for widgets on business sites: Maps with traffic information, shipping cost calculators, store cams, live chat windows, etc. Widgets can make Web pages both more useful as well as more cluttered. We're going to see both.

By way of show-and-tell, this is the Google moonphase widget:

Rafe Needleman writes about start-ups, new technologies, and Web 2.0 products, as editor of CNET's Webware. E-mail Rafe.
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by ciarenas March 12, 2009 6:28 AM PDT
Thank you , I always read your advices before take any new add to my computer, I´m a housewife but I need my cp to be inform and have acess to my children, they are in U.S.A, in their university and I´m in Finlad for a while.
Thank you and please take care of you.
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