Widget Wonders

If some of the latest funding news is any indication, widgets are the newest must-have for every content-driven site as well as Web 2.0 apps. Widgetbox allows users to create their own widgets, which can then be used on blogs and other web pages for everything from highlighting the RSS feed of another blog to running games in a sidebar.

And while widgets are the darlings of Web 2.0 companies from MyBlogLog to Flickr, even old-school companies are jumping on the widget train, such as ESPN's release this week of a huge selection of widgets ranging from news stories to stats.

One new company who debuted at DEMO this week was SproutBuilder, which has gotten quite a bit of attention on blogs and Twitter streams I've been reading. Sprout uses a drag-and-drop interface based on Adobe Flex that creates a Flash widget.

Other 2.0 companies are taking advantage of the desktop. For my fellow Mac users, Joost also introduced a widget this week that lets you browse shows right from the Dashboard, then launches the selected channel.

CoverItLive also offers itself as a widget that shows live blogging as it is happening, letting readers interact as you blog all within the widget, finally saving the live blog transcript as a static entry.

Even marketers are taking advantage of widget technology, with a new entry by Cartfly that allows you to leverage blogs and social networking by adding widgetized store entries instead of static ads.

Widgets may be a fad, but the ability to provide interaction rather than using static information will probably turn widgets into a standard feature that most apps and business provide.