Today, widgets fall into a few general categories. The most popular function as reference tools, news and information aggregators, planning tools and finally, as communications alerts. Here are few worth investigating:

Reference tools

Widgets were conceived with the anorak in mind. And thus, it should be no surprise that countless apps were created to map, chart and measure. The favoured application, without a doubt is mapping, thanks in part to the rage around “geotagging.” Platial’s MapKit is a good example, enabling users to build maps of their driving holiday abroad, tagging each town with blog entries, video clips and photos.

News/Information aggregators

Headline aggregators were among the first widgets and netizens have been subscribing to RSS feeds of select news topics for years. Thousands of widgets now exist sending everything from Dilbert cartoons to BBC breaking news alerts to the desktop. One popular example is DashFeed, which takes multiple news feeds at any one time and, for visual relief, displays them in separate tabs. Users can fine-tune the feeds to get just headlines or longer versions with synopsis attached.


Planning tools
Still unimpressed with web calendars? Check out 30 Boxes interactive calendar, called 30 Boxed. It allows you to build a calendar out of any piece of information online, mashing together news headlines, personal photos and blog feeds. Here’s an example.

Communications Alerts

If you have multiple e-mail addresses to monitor, an instant message account that’s always buzzing and a Skype number that rings off the hook, then a widget or two to help you keep on top of the communications tsunami is long overdue. But the really interesting widgets go beyond one-click monitoring and mailing. A series of new widgets permit netizens to send free text messages to friends. One popular service that allows thumbs-free messaging and enables you to listen to mobile phone voicemail messages on the computer is CallWave

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Bernhard Warner is a technology reporter based in Rome. He is the former European Internet Correspondent for Reuters and, prior to that was a senior editor at The Industry Standard. His work has appeared in Wired, The Times Online, Time and The Guardian, to name a few. He also works as a Web 2.0 consultant for Custom Communication

Published on 27 April 2007