Web Widgets for Blogs and Social Networks

Google Gadgets

What are they? What do they do? How do they work? Well, widgets today have become as easy as a walk in the park.

Widgets, Gadgets, Little Applications for your Desktop, Toolbar, Blog, or Social Networks site.

A web widget is actually a portable chunk of code that can be placed, installed, and executed within any HTML based web page. After placed, it enhances your page from the idea of code reuse.

Google Gadgets, Yahoo Widgets, Apples one stop widget warehouse. These sites and other descriptions for the web widget like gadget, badge, webjit, capsule, snippet, mini, and flake can all be searched and will deliver multiple web widget sites.

Web widgets sometimes use Flash or Javascript and can be clocks, countdowns, weather information boxes, stock tickers, 3D photo cubes, Friend Adders, or blog updaters for your favorite sites. These codes draw from the Internet to bring the Widgets main information to the user and their visitors so you don’t need to go hopping around from site to site to get the latest information. You don’t actually need to go to the other sites, just view the needed data right there on your site through the chosen web widgets.

If you follow the stocks or weather, specific blog sites (this is a big plus for web wdgets here), Google Reader lets you take your updated blog reading list with you. Put the Google Reader web widget on your own site and keep up with the newest posts from your favorite sites.

We follow a lot of the Social Networks this way as many have their own blog site as well. Sites like Twitter, Blogger, MySpace, and others have their own private widgets available. Through sites like IGoogle, you have the option to set up your own personal page to view all of the selected widgets you choose at a glance.

IGoogle makes it easy to request web widgets to be added to your pages. They alleviate the need of copy and paste, you just browse through the widget selection, select the ones you like with a one click system. Visit your page to grab and rearrange your chosen web widgets and there you go. You have created a one stop set up of embeddable chunks of code.

Remember, a web widget is anything that can be embedded within a page of HTML (a web page) that adds content to a page that isn’t static, meaning it automatically is adding fresh page content as it refreshes.

Web widgets are quite common and used by Bloggers, Social Networkers, and personal website owners. Like I previously mentioned above, home page sites like IGoogle, NetVibes, and Page Flakes are made to be easiest to create a home page for yourself of widgets to stay in touch with what is imporatnt to you

Apps or widgets placed on a third party web site via embedded code, then the widget brings “right now” information and added content like links, images, and advertisements from the other third party sites without the web site owner having to update as often.

Keep in mind that widgets can also be used  for detrimental purposes transporting viruses or other negative reasons like enticing people to download adware.

Listen into our Blogs and Social Networks Blog Talk Radio Show on Widgets for more.

Stephanie Haile aka Wavecritter Google Me

November 5, 2008. Tags: Blogs and Social Networks, Google Gadgets, Stephanie Haile, Wavecritter, Web Widgets, whats a widget, yahoo widgets. Blogs and Social Networks, Web Widgets. Leave a comment.