On Widgets
They're crap. The end.
Well, maybe it's not that cut and dried. I'm researching them for a project I'm working on right now. We're looking into ways of rolling out widgets to users of this product for the web or their desktop. I'm just in the research phase right now, but let's look at some examples that are out there...
There's just a few. Look at those: what do you see? A lot of blinking and changing stuff, a lot of useless functionality, a lot of completely disparate styles that you have little control over. These are designed to be embedded into things like MySpace pages of blogs. People browsing to your page can't turn them off or choose not to see them. They're distracting, they're loud, they're ugly. Remind you of anything?
Like, say, blinking text? Animated gifs? Scrolling marquis? Stuff that hasn't honestly been used since the 90s? I think so, too.
Unfortunately, a lot of these are aimed at the MySpace generation (which I'm glad to count myself NOT a part of - though I may soon need to get an account just because of work... I do working in a direct marketing agency) who are in a large part not even close to reaching 'God this is garish' maturity yet.
I can't really point fingers, though. The first (1996) iteration of my own homepage employed at least animated gifs and perhaps blinking text - though I think I stayed away from the scrolling marquis. Anyone who remembers my page from that time gets a cookie.
Still... blech.
(And yes, most of my crappy widget examples are Google Gadgets. No way I'm signing up on one of those other sites just to have mocking fodder. Not worth it.)
4 Comments
You're right, your widgets are pretty innoccuous. I wouldn't even know the Twitter one was a widget.
I think you're right: I'm an aesthetic snob. Anything you can style to look like the rest of the site works way better than stuff you can't.
Nothing wrong with aesthetic snobbery in this arena. They're not gonna take off beyond the world of MySpace, if they don't offer some form of customisation.
Just one thing to clarify - there is a difference between Google Gadgets and the Gadgets that you can get my logging into your Google Personalized Homepage. Those marked By Google are not nearly as obnoxious...
Sorry, have to defend the Mothership.
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Beth Ballingall
food lover : world traveller : gamer : New Yorker : twenty-something : former Londoner : handbag lover : erstwhile soprano : geek
I'm using two widgets on my blog right now: one showing my latest Twitter message, and one showing MyBlogLog visitors.
Both are useful, and neither is massively intrusive. I think the issue here isn't the concept (small chunks of code adding functionality from another site), but the aesthetic execution of most widgets.