Tuesday, January 30, 2007

The Year of the Widget is Upon Us

The Year 2007 will be the year of the widget, says Newsweek.

But, of course! I had'nt expected this kind of resonance to my thoughts, but I sure feel validated.

Widgets featured in the article may fall short of going mainstream. The current crop of widgets run only on Windows Vista and on the forthcoming Apple OS. None of those are mainstream. Not yet, and not likely to be in 2007. The current lot also does not bring the desktop context to the widget, nor does it interact amongst each other.

The widget-on-the-web, such as Netvibes or Pageflake, may become mainstream though.

My feeling is, the term Widget will get redefined during the year, evolve to address the desktop connectivity issue, get re-purposed, and certainly kick up some dust - not just dust, maybe a storm.

- Sangeeta

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Accenture's Trivergence Blog (accenture.com/trivergenceblog) has an interesting post on how these widgets will evolve into control panels for networked devices.